


Towerfall

by anstoirm



Series: Fireteam Ward [4]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, The Red War (Destiny), taking canon and veering sliiiiiightly to the left
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2020-12-24 08:43:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21096647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anstoirm/pseuds/anstoirm
Summary: Roland stares at the command ship as it drifts slowly towards the center of the City-towards the Traveler, its gargantuan form partially obscured with billowing smoke from the fires and explosions below and held within the grasp of that claw-like device he saw before. Some kind of shimmering field has begun to stretch between those prongs, rippling over the Traveler’s surface.He hasn’t felt this kind of discomforting fear in a long time, and he has to wonder if there’s anything they can do to stop this.He doubts it.Or: Fireteam Ward and how they survive the start of the Red War.





	1. Roland

**Author's Note:**

> this is an itch i've been meaning to scratch for a while, so here, have this retelling of the beginning of Destiny 2's campaign featuring my absolute MESS of a fireteam.

Something is very wrong, and it has nothing to do with the storm clouds surrounding his ship as he flies through the upper Himalayas.

Ghost, too, can feel it, nervous energy thick enough to be felt by Roland as his companion tries to hail someone for the fourth time. “Repeat, Tower Approach, this is–this is City Hawk seven-two-three. Anyone home…?”

A full two minutes tick by with nothing but radio silence.

“No response. On any channels. Not even–not even the emergency frequencies.”

“You can’t tell what’s causing the interference?” Roland asks, grip tightening on the ship controls.

Ghost drifts down to hide within his hood. “No.”

Tower communications don’t just go _silent_. Even when he isn’t frequenting City limits Ghost has been able to pick up scattered encrypted transmissions and otherwise–whether it’s a transmission Ghost is able to crack or not, with how large the City is and how active the Vanguard keeps guardian forces, the lines are _always_ annoyingly chatty.

A silent Vanguard isn’t a good sign.

Maybe he can’t give less of a shit about the actual people there, but if he had learned anything from his past, it’s that more often than not, things go far beyond what he or _anyone_ actually cares about. The world is bigger than one person, and selfishness is ugly.

“You remember how–how I always tell you that you fly too fast?” Ghost says after a tense pause. “Forget I ever said it. Fly fast.”

He doesn’t need to be told twice.

Roland guns the throttle and pushes the engines into redline, diving into the stormy clouds surrounding the City airspace with experienced confidence and narrowing his eyes at the visuals that pop in to overlay the shrouded viewport. More static; no simulated visuals whatsoever.

The sensors aren’t picking up anything, not even the ground below. What the fuck is going on?

He goes stiff when the useless static drops away from the viewport and his ship exits the dark, stormy clouds–that he realizes aren’t just stormy. The thunder that had been rattling the hull of his ship isn’t just thunder. The lightning that had been illuminating the interior and flashing through the clouds isn’t just lightning.

Missiles streak through the stormy sky into the City streets and towering skyscrapers below. Debris crashes down the sides of the walls as ballistics and alien fire tear into them. Around them are the massive warships and frigates of the Cabal, and swarming in between are the smaller carrier and assault craft. A strange, claw-like device is settled against the surface of the Traveler.

The City is under attack.

“How did we not hear a rally?” Roland demands as he veers his ship into a sharp turn towards the Vanguard tower, teeth gritting when its crumbling structure roaring with pockets of flame enters his vision.

Ghost is panicked, flashing out of sight in fear. ‘_I don’t–I don’t know! All the channels are silent!_’

He starts to snap something else, but a thresher drops from the billowing clouds of smoke above and a volley of rockets rip through the air towards him. Another quick-reflex maneuver dodges most of them, but Roland jerks in his seat when at least one of them manages to tear into the ship’s frame.

‘_That hit the fuselage! We n-need to land!_’

Damnit, he had spent a _fortune_ of glimmer modifying this ship. Jumpships just aren’t made for combat; next time he’s investing in a Reef fleet fighter.

Swearing aloud, he veers around the thresher back towards the ruined Tower, aiming for the open plaza situated in front of the Vanguard hall.

The ship’s engines sputter once and his stomach leaps up into his chest as it abruptly drops. No time or engine power to regain that altitude, so he steers instead for the fiery, open guts of the lower levels of the Tower, somehow still miraculously clinging to the main structure.

Silence descends upon the interior of the ship like a vacuum had sucked the air out.

Engines dead.

“_Transmat now!_” he barks, ship viewport dropping below the destroyed section he’d been aiming for.

Space flickers apart around him, and in a flash of particles and light Ghost drops him unsteadily onto a crumbling chunk of flooring that shakes and threatens to give way under his sudden weight. His arms fly out to steady himself, and with a hurried pulse of light he hops forward onto a more stable chunk of solid ground.

The platform he’d landed on crunches and breaks off, the noise of it crashing down drowned out a handful of seconds later as his ship slams into the wall at an angle and rips exterior panels off, exposing the levels and decks within on its violent path to the ground with gut-wrenching screeches of metal on metal.

He doesn’t bother hoping no one is within those sections. The Cabal are tearing through the City, and people are without a doubt already dead.

Ghost drops his pulse rifle into his hands, and Roland sets in motion, navigating the teetering ledge of what had once been a systems hub on the _inside_ of the Tower.

“_Vanguard personnel, this–this is guardian ident eight-two-eight-three-C, requesting–we’re within the Tower and heading inside,”_ Ghost calls out, trying and failing to keep his voice even on the ground channel. “_Requesting orders!_”

Nothing but more static, the occasional explosion or gunfire garbled by the chaotic frequencies breaking through.

Ghost’s voice is little more than a fearful whine. “_Anyone_?”

Roland runs toward a hole in the wall leading further inside, the makeshift door framed by fire. His mouth opens to tell Ghost to save his energy, and the words are halted when a legionnaire rushes through the opening at him. He backpedals before the alien’s heated arm blade can cut him in two.

A three-round burst from his pulse rifle pops the legionnaire’s head from its massive shoulders with a hiss of organofluid, and the one that runs in after its ally suffers the same fate.

‘_This doesn’t...it doesn’t make any sense–the Cabal conquer systems by blowing up entire planets of oppositional civilizations, not _invading_ them._’

Roland steps around the Cabal bodies and moves into the Tower. “Unless they want something.”

Conquering is the _typical_ play for the Cabal, but if they want something, they dig in and fight for it with everything they’ve got. The exclusion zone on Mars just outside of Freehold, the Vex gate leading to the Black Garden, the Dust Palace–hell, even the Dantalion Exodus on the Dreadnaught.

The Cabal are frighteningly ruthless in general, but if they want something–_really_ want something–they become utterly terrifying.

For the first time since they entered the solar system, they’re laying siege to the City after years of not giving a single damn about it. These Cabal are here for something.

The only answer can be the Traveler, especially when he remembers that strange device he’d noticed settled onto its inert shell.

“_This is Commander Zavala to all channels,_” the voice of the awoken Vanguard commander finally crackles in over ground comms, and he slows to a halt to listen. “_Vanguard Tower personnel: report to evac points immediately. Guardians: rendezvous in the Plaza. Our City will not fall_.”

Ever optimistic and noble.

And stupid.

Still, what else are guardians good for other than throwing themselves against the enemy like lemmings, abusing their immortality to fight impossible odds? Humorlessly, he thinks, ‘_sir, yes, sir’_ as he continues onward.

Weaving through hallways and debris and sparking, shredded power lines falling from ceilings at just shy of a breakneck pace, he rounds a corner and spots a Tower civilian at the end of a hall. He’s facing away, hands held up as though trying to fend something off.

A terrified cry leaves his mouth as Roland’s increases his speed.

He doesn’t make it in time, a legionnaire lumbering into sight and impaling the worker on an arm-mounted blade, spattering blood and worse on the tiled floor as the body is tossed aside.

The Cabal catches sight of him, roars in challenge–and Roland answers by firing a volley of bullets into its head. An arc grenade that splits into tracking clusters follows, homing in on the two others that run into sight after.

Not waiting for the dust to clear, he moves on. The civilian he’d failed to save barely even crosses his mind.

‘_This shouldn’t be–this shouldn’t be happening. The wall has defenses. How–how could so many get past?_’ Their current predicament should be enough to keep Ghost from wasting time on questions like that, but Roland keeps his mouth shut.

Ghost’s never been the same since Carran fell to Valen’s brutality, and he’s gotten used to his overly nervous nature.

Ahead of them an automated door hangs ajar, one half still attempting to shut but caught on something stuck in the runner. As Roland approaches it, something–some_one_–slams into the thin edge of the door and forces it wide open.

Ghost blips in surprise. “_Cayde!_”

Head shaking off the daze of the blow and glowing blue eyes blinking, Cayde-6 looks at them with a pleasantly surprised expression. He’s cheery as though he _isn’t _in the middle of fighting off an enemy invasion in the heart of the City’s command and a group of well-armed legionnaires _aren’t_ approaching from his other side. “Hey, you two! Gimme a sec.”

The air pulses heavy with a discharge of light; Roland watches as the Hunter Vanguard’s body lights with solar energy and the gun in his hand glows a fiery orange.

Booming shots of the Golden Gun vaporize three of the approaching group, leaving two more–who let out short-lived howls as an ear-ringing _fweem_ of linear fusion rifle rounds strike them in the back and turn them to ash.

From the flashes of void fire, a helmetless blonde woman jogs up, spinning around and checking for more enemies. The dark gray jacket she wears looks like the robes of a warlock, but everything else about her speaks of something _other_.

She looks familiar, and his brow furrows when she turns around to face Cayde–sparing him a single glance. Is it her he’s seen frequenting the war room with Cayde and Ikora?

“Nice shootin’, sunshine. I could’a handled it,” Cayde quips, the familiarity more or less confirming his question.

One of her shoulders lifts in a half shrug. “Can’t let you have all the fun.”

Of all the times for the Hunter Vanguard’s moronic, Goddamned devil-may-care attitude...and _she’s_ not helping. “Can someone explain to me what the _fuck_ is going on?”

The two of them glance at him; she lifts an eyebrow at him, and Cayde looks like he had forgotten he was even there. Attention-deficit, annoyingly cheery piece of exo shit. How he became a leader is beyond Roland.

Cayde’s the one that answers, much to Roland’s chagrin. “We got blindsided. Satellites went dark. Next thing we know–_boom_. Missiles to the face. Zavala’s pissed. Ikora’s pissed. _I’m_ pissed–wait, maybe I’m the only one that’s pissed. No, no, Ikora’s _definitely_ pissed–”

“So, what’s the _plan_?” Roland’s fingers twitch on the grip of his pulse rifle impatiently.

“The plan,” Cayde says, spinning his hand cannon by the trigger around his finger and lifting it to the ceiling, “is me having a date with whoever’s behind this. It’ll be a short date.”

“_Cayde, you can’t just…_” Ghost starts.

‘Can’t’ isn’t a word in the exo’s vocabulary, Roland knows, and Cayde reinforces that knowledge by brushing the concern off and backing away. “Talk later, kick butt now. Zavala’s doing the hero act in the Plaza. You guys meet up with him, I gotta go shoot a probably very big space rhino in the ugly face.”

Like himself, the blonde is surprised by Cayde’s order. “I’m going with you, Cayde.”

“Nah, you’re gonna back up Big Blue along with this hunter. The civilians he’s defending are the priority.” He starts to back away from the door, moving towards a jagged hole from the collapsed ceiling in the corner of the room.

Roland bristles. “I don’t need–”

“Vanguard’s orders! Shoot the bad guys, and I’ll see you on the flip side.” Without waiting for a response or more protests, he hops up through the hole in the ceiling and vanishes from sight.

Both he and the blonde stare at the hole and then look at each other warily.

“Guess we’re a team, now,” she says at a length. “I’m Quinn.”

“I don’t care.” He veers around her.

A snort reaches his back. If that alone isn’t enough to irritate him, her bootsteps following as he breaks into an urgent jog definitely are; he doesn’t play well with others. “Nice to meet you too, asshole,” she says.

His expression twists in distaste.

Thankfully, she says nothing else as he leads them onward through the Tower, hallways in various states of collapse and destruction. Considering she’s a friend of the Vanguard, it’s odd that she chooses to follow him rather than take the lead; her association implies some kind of leadership, but she seems content to follow.

It leaves him free to ignore her, though, so he won’t complain.

He rounds a corner and comes to a rapid halt when the business end of a shotgun is shoved into his face. Human-made, Vanguard design. After realizing, Roland steps back and lets the Redjack frame from Shaxx’s personal team register his FOF tag.

“Guardian.” The Redjack’s optics shift to Quinn as she approaches, and the shotgun lowers. “Guardian. Proceed ahead.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Roland replies, flatly.

He and Quinn step around the pair of frames guarding the hallway and move up a short flight of stairs into another hall, pausing at the sight of almost two dozen civilians and Tower workers huddled inside. More frames stand guard around them.

A mother sits against a wall a handful of feet away, cradling a toddler to her chest with terrified tears in her eyes.

Quinn walks past him, and Roland uses the motion as an excuse to tear his eyes away and force down the black tightness that had formed in his chest. Familiarity mixed with grim acceptance. Farther down the hall near a set of sealed doors is the recognizable, hulking figure of the Crucible’s handler.

Lord Shaxx, in his trademark, imposing white and orange armor and one-horned helmet, stands as Quinn approaches him at a brisk pace. There’s a sword glowing with fiery light strapped to his back, and a simple dark brown mark brushes the backs of his legs much like Quinn’s tailed coat does her own.

She’s barely tall enough for the top of her head to reach the titan’s shoulders. It’d be funny if they didn’t have more important things to worry about.

“Ah, the little lioness,” he says, accented voice warm and relieved. Apparently, she’s good at making friends. He’s not envious of the fact. “I’m glad to see you made it unscathed. Where’s your paramour?”

His lips curl in a sneer at the casual question; does no one in this fucking Tower have any sense of staying focused while a damn _invasion_ is happening all around them? Roland stops next to her with a pointed stomp of his boot. “We need to get through.”

That flat surface of Shaxx’s helmet turns to sight on him, but he says nothing and Quinn ignores him outright. “Cayde sent us to rendezvous with Zavala. He went off to find out who’s behind this, I think.”

Roland blinks at the response, surprise wiping away the angry bristling he’d begun to feel at being ignored as he puts the question and answer together. Is she saying–

“Of course he did. Reckless.” Shaxx shakes his head.

“Will you let us through already?” Roland impatiently demands, discarding the connection because he will _not_ fucking fall to their level of inept distraction.

Quinn shoots him a nasty look; like she had just a moment ago to him, he ignores her.

“Answer the call, guardians,” Shaxx replies, aggravatingly unconcerned with Roland’s vitriol. “Follow the path through here, it will lead you through the hangar to the Plaza. I’ll take care of these people. Give the Cabal the war they so desire.”

They both watch as he pries the door open with brute force alone, holding it ajar without the barest hint of strain. With how tightly it looked shut and the stressed whir of straining mechanisms, they must have sabotaged the door to prevent entry by unwanted guests.

He’s reminded, not for the first time, why everyone and their mother is afraid of an angry Shaxx.

“Be careful,” Quinn says to the titan, slipping through the gap in the door easily.

Shaxx nods once at her. “You need it more than I, but I will.”

Roland gets no such well wishes as he struggles slightly more than he had to bypass the door. He honestly doesn’t give a shit, but he wonders about the parting statement; why would she need to worry more than any other guardian, given the circumstances?

From here she takes the lead, moving with a lithe agility (the tailcoat outfit says warlock, the agility says hunter, what _is_ she?) through the corridors and rear workings of the Tower until they reach the exterior deck and catwalk heading down to the side of the Tower the hangar juts out of.

A klaxon blares over the P.A. system, barely decipherable over the roar of Cabal war engines and what few guardian jumpships remain in the air racing by. “_Evacuation order Seven Seven is in effect. This is not a drill. All civilians report to the designated evacuation areas immediately.”_

Provided those evacuation areas aren’t completely demolished by this point already–and provided more people are even left.

He dodges around a puddle of blood seeping out from underneath collapsed rubble as well as the arm sticking out limply from within the pile, deciding that if anyone’s still around to evacuate, they’ve already reached the landing zones. He’s seen this before, and Roland hates that he had allowed himself to hope he never would again.

The platform under their feet rumbles as they approach the catwalk leading down to the hangar, the deafening thrum of massive engines filling the air. Both of them stop and watch as a red-hulled, flattened ship, large enough to stretch across a quarter of the miles-long distance between one wall Tower to the next, flies overhead.

“_Look at the size of that thing,_” another ghost, presumably hers, speaks up with an awed voice over the team comm he hadn’t even noticed had opened up,_ “it must be their command ship_.”

Roland stares at it as it drifts slowly towards the center of the City–towards the Traveler, its gargantuan form partially obscured with billowing smoke from the fires and explosions below and held within the grasp of that claw-like device he saw before. Some kind of shimmering field has begun to stretch between those prongs, rippling over the Traveler’s surface.

He hasn’t felt this kind of discomforting fear in a long time, and Roland has to wonder if there’s anything they can do to stop this.

He doubts it.


	2. Leilani

“Darin?”

Leilani’s fingers hurt from digging. A few of her nails have broken already, and her hands and arms are beginning to ache with the strain of trying to clear the debris of what had once been one of the most popular guardian bars within the City.

The main structure is still intact, but the roof had caved in. Tables and chairs were blasted into splinters, or overturned and broken from slamming into walls if they had been lucky enough to avoid what she can only guess was a near-direct missile strike.

One of those broken tables had cracked her upside the head. She can feel the blood trickling down the side of her face from the resulting injury, matting in her long, dark hair–but she’s clear-headed enough for this, and she is _not_ going to run when she _knows _the old exo bastard that hired her is too stubborn to let some little old missile strike kill him.

“Darin!” Delia and Keli 55-30 are dead and destroyed already, but Darin’s still alive. She knows he is. “C’mon, old man! Up and at ‘em!”

Outside, the ground rumbles with distant explosions, the air splits with fire and bullets, and she can hear shouts and screams and the roar of engines both near and far. Save for the fire and bullets and shouting, these are sounds she’s unfamiliar with, but she doesn’t have to be familiar with them to know what’s happening.

She’s losing her home again. She’s perfectly okay with losing her home again.

She is _not_ losing her family again.

A piece of rubble slips under her fingers and rolls with a loud crash to the ground at her feet; the entire pile she’s digging in shifts with a groan of sheared rebar and concrete and wood–another groan follows the first, this one muffled and recognizable.

Her lips twitch in a relieved grin and she doubles her efforts in spite of the fact the chunks of building and structure are now too large for her human strength and nothing moves.

Then, the entire pile heaves up. Slowly at first, and then in a show of raw strength and power bursts up and crashes out from the center.

She hops back, barely avoiding a falling beam of wood, and watches as the synthetic, black-plated form of her boss and friend stumbles out of the pile.

The loose tank top he wears is ripped to shreds, heavy damage to his musculature on full display, but he unsteadily moves away from the debris that had collapsed on him. Dropping to his knees on the floor and coughing harshly from the dust and damage, his jaw light pulses erratically as he looks around in a waning daze.

It’s probably hard to take everything in when half his face is damaged to hell and back and one of his optics is completely non-functional, flickering and sparking.

“What the hell happened?” he wheezes.

“Not sure yet,” she replies, dropping to his side and lifting his arm over his shoulder to help him to his feet–with difficulty. At least he’s not in the full plate he’d be wearing were he still on active duty, but now she knows why Nyx constantly teases Nik about his ‘weight’.

She spares a moment to wonder if titans are reborn with denser muscles than other guardians.

Sounds of battle still rage outside, distant but growing worryingly close. She struggles to pull him away from the debris, ignoring the crunch of broken glass under her feet. The door is collapsed, but there’s also a collapsed hole in the wall, and she steers him that way instead.

The sky above them is dark, not just from storms but from smoke and ash and the burning engines of ships that are definitely not guardian-class. Those are–

“Cabal. We’re under attack,” Darin coughs next to her, standing upright on unsteady feet.

He steps away from her and stumbles; she holds her hands out, ready to catch him if he falls. Knowing how scrawny she is compared to the old exo, he’d likely just knock her to the ground, but it doesn’t matter to her.

One of his hands settles on his midsection, and it’s then that she notices torn synthetic muscles and sparking, exposed circuits. No blood or whatever _counts_ as blood for exos–do they even have it?–but she hopes that won’t cause any fatal problems.

Both of them go still at the sound of approaching gunfire. Alien weaponry, heavy and hissing as they boil the air rather than cut through it like hard slugs. Screams and more explosions follow.

“You need to run, kid,” Darin rasps, moving slowly until he finds a solid surface to lean against.

“I don’t think so.” She hopes he sounds more assured than she feels. She’s never seen the Cabal up close before, but she’s heard enough stories from bar patrons and Nik and his team alike to know to fear them.

He starts to grouse something back, but she ignores him and tells him to _wait right there_, turning and heading back for the bar with quick feet.

She’s careful as she ambles back into the building, stepping around debris as quickly as she dares and hopping herself up to lean bodily over the still-standing counter. Her dark eyes scan the interior behind the counter until they settle on what she’s looking for.

Two minutes later, she’s rushing back out to where Darin is still waiting.

With a solid metal baseball bat in hand.

Darin coughs out a weak laugh that borders on humorless at the sight of her holding it. “You think that’s gonna do anything against the Cabal?”

“Maybe not,” she replies breezily, once again reaching out to offer him a steadying hand and coaxing him forward; he waves her off with an irritable and pained pinch of his face plates. “Might give ‘em a headache, though.”

This time his laugh is genuine.

Alien language echoes down a nearby street, getting louder as the origin approaches. With a grunt, Darin puts a hand on her back and guides her in the other direction.

She knows where to go. The nearest evac station is a little under a mile away from the bar–the reigning question is whether or not they can make it there before they’re either caught in the destruction or the last evac shuttles leave.

It’s a struggle to fight down the urge to find Nikon. He’d give her hell for prioritizing him over her own life, and she knows he’s survived against impossible odds once before already.

A volley of missiles fire somewhere above, and both of them stop and turn to watch as a smaller Cabal ship attacks a City-issue jumpship. The ship erupts into flames and veers for the looming Vanguard Tower, crashing violently into the side of the wall and tearing a gash through it with a hair-raising noise.

The ground shakes when it collides with it, and the top of an explosive cloud appears over the rooftops and distant streets.

Darin urges her forward again after that.

A blinding spotlight sweeps the street they had just passed, forcing both of them to duck behind the nearest cover they can find while the ship it comes from drifts overhead.

Then a startled cry comes from nearby, and the ship veers off quickly. Rockets fire and slam into unseen surfaces, silencing the harsher screams that follow. She swallows thickly; the chaos of the City under siege is worse than what she’s already experienced. Much, much worse.

Carran had been ransacked by just a handful of rogue guardians, burnt to the ground and slaughtered for what amounted to sport to their sadistic leader.

But this...this is destruction on a whole other scale.

Ahead of them comes the thrum of more engines, and another ship drops from above, its spotlight sweeping the street and nearly lighting on them before Darin drags her further behind cover. He hisses from the pain the motion causes, stifling it as best as he can.

She turns and looks around their cover in spite of his hand fisted in the back of her shirt, watching as a dozen Cabal with massive guns and a few with glowing shields hop from the ship and land with loud thumps of heavy boots.

Cracks of a gun announce someone’s presence from an adjacent street, a shot managing to kill one of the aliens in the group. The familiar sound of a guardian’s supercharge let loose comes after; leaping from a ledge down into the street before the aliens comes the electricity-charged form of a heavily-armored guardian.

They crash to the ground with a booming sound like a clap of thunder, their light turning another few of the aliens to ash.

The two shielded Cabal sidestep the charging guardian, one to either side, and between their shields a glowing net flickers into existence. The guardian, without time to dodge around it, runs straight through it–

–and the brilliantly flickering arc energy that surrounds their body vanishes like a switch had been flipped.

They stumble and collapse to the ground, rolling from their momentum and coming to a stop a handful of feet away from the remaining enemies. The rumbling sounds she can only assume is laughter leave her feeling chilled.

Next to the guardian there’s a small burst of light. Even from yards away she knows she’s seeing their ghost drop to the ground, and it doesn’t move. Her throat constricts.

_You ever wonder how to kill a guardian, sweetheart?_

She’s been scared up until now, definitely, but now she’s _terrified_. Memories of the assault on her old home flash through her mind, the image of a battered Nikon staring down the barrel of a gun, the booming crack of it firing in her ear–

One of the Cabal lifts a massive foot and slams it down on the prone ghost, shattering it with a pop and sending a pulse of brilliant light through the air. More laughter erupts from the aliens when the guardian gets to their feet and lunges at one of them with nothing but their bare hands.

They’re knocked back to the ground.

Leilani covers her mouth with her hand and spins back into cover just as one of the aliens starts to bring the edge of its shield down on the guardian’s head.

“Shit,” Darin’s expression–even half-mangled as it is–is twisted with fury and horror in equal measure. “Some kinda light-suppression net? We gotta go, kid. Now.”

Without protest she follows Darin’s lead, moving out of cover as soon as they’re sure the Cabal are facing away. It’s impossible for her to swallow down her fear like she’s been able to before, now. She’s already seen Nikon ‘die’ once, but the idea of losing him for good like _that_?

Focus.

He cheated death once. He can do it again.

They keep moving as quickly as they can towards the evac station, ducking into alleys and between or through empty and destroyed buildings to dodge Cabal squads and ships flying overhead. The screaming civilians and burning buildings they pass by make her skin crawl with unfortunate familiarity.

She hates not being able to stop and help. Now that she’s older, she knows why Nik had reacted the way he had when a much tinier and more naive version of herself had demanded to know where _she_ could get a ghost like him, but it doesn’t stop her from wishing, right then, that she could fight the way a guardian can.

As it stands, when they leave the darkness of an alley and she runs face-first into the helm of one of the tiny types of Cabal, the most she can do is let out a startled scream and instinctively swing the bat in her hands with every ounce of strength she has right at the alien’s head.

Her arms jolt with the force of the strike, the alien–like her–too startled to dodge out of the way, and it stumbles away from her.

Then a loud war cry reverberates off the tall buildings surrounding her, and her eyes dart over to the hulking figure of a much, much larger Cabal with a very large gun that makes her measly baseball bat look like a twig.

It lifts the gun.

In panic, she freezes.

“Leilani, _move_!”

Distantly, she realizes that the order had come from Nikon, but her feet remain rooted to the ground and her wide eyes remain fixed on the Cabal approaching her at an alarming speed.

Someone snags the back of her shirt again, yanking her out of the way just as the red-and-black armored titan that has protected her since she was a belligerent six year old charges by, body swathed in furious flames.

His shoulder lowers, and he slams into the larger Cabal at full speed, the flames of Nikon’s light consuming the alien and turning it to ash.

From somewhere above, Nyx drops to the ground in front of them, her white shoulder cloak rippling against her back and purple-accented armor gleaming with the red of Nik’s flames. 

A burst of fire from the rifle in her hands removes the tiny alien she had given a good _thwack_ with her bat out of the picture; she turns quickly, sweeping her rifle across the open street. “Gladiator, three o’clock!”

Another massive Cabal, two intimidating blades in hand, rushes into sight towards Nikon. He turns, too slow to lift the gun in his hands and fire on it before it’s upon him; her heart leaps into her throat when he simply drops the gun and twists to avoid a lightning-fast swing of the alien’s blade.

Ducking, he drives his shoulder into the taller creature’s midsection and shoves it back–then leaps from the ground, grabs hold of a ridge on its chest armor to lift himself to its eye level, and with a furious roar drives a fist glowing with fiery light into its throat.

She watches with a morbid fascination as he rips his hand out with a spray of alien gore, stomach turning gurgles leaving the alien as its weapons clatter to the ground. He hops back from it on light feet.

The alien drops heavily, twitches a few times, and then goes still.

“Radar’s clear,” Nyx says, stance relaxing minutely.

Nikon spins, slowing only to grab his discarded rifle before moving towards Leilani. Dropping to his knee–because Darin had dragged her back so fast she’d stumbled onto her ass and she hadn’t even realized it until now–in front of her, he reaches out with the hand _not_ currently covered in alien viscera and turns her head to eye the blood drying on the side of her face. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. The bar got hit, Darin got the worst of it.” She swats his hand away.

Darin grumbles in offense. “Had worse before.”

“When you still had a ghost, old man,” Nyx quips good-naturedly.

“I was killin’ Hive and chasing Fallen outta their foxholes before you were even risen, brat,” he bites out in turn, though the vehement statement is marred by the coughing fit that interrupts near the end. Once it dies down, he winces. “Focus, ‘cause we gotta get movin’. Saw some Cabal use some kinda net to rob another guardian of their light. Rather not see you kids end up like that.”

Nik steps back as Leilani gets to her feet; his head tips to the side as Ion speaks to him within his helmet. “Evac station’s been destroyed in this area. Next closest one is in the Consensus district.”

“That’s miles away,” Nyx glances at her and Darin, “we’ll never manage to make it that far. By the time we do, the Cabal could destroy it, too.”

Leilani fights down frustration at what Nyx probably hadn’t intended to say without saying, but did anyway–that _she and Nikon_ could make it, but_ her and Darin_ would slow them down. She’s never hated being human more than she does in moments like this.

Leilani shifts uneasily, gaze darting around as though she’ll catch sight of more attackers before Nik and Nyx will. She’s never come face to face with any of humanity’s enemies, save for the Fallen and the warlords outside the city, and she decides that with everything she’s seen in just under an hour since this invasion began, she vastly prefers them.

The Fallen, anyway. That she’s friends with one of them has only a _little_ bearing on that revelation.

She’ll never voice that aloud. Especially not with Nik in earshot, and certainly not when the three of them devolve into an argument about what to do.

“–Cabal are shooting down jumpships trying to run from City airspace. We’re just going to end up another statistic if we try that,” Nyx says.

Nik’s voice is as grim as she’s ever heard since that time after Carran had been razed to the ground and he’d barely slipped out of death’s clutches. “Provided they haven’t destroyed the ships docked in the hangar’s lower levels already.”

“So there’s no way out,” Darin coughs once, and when he continues his frustrated rebuttal is a good deal less forceful, “that’s what you’re sayin’.”

“Unless we head for a gate and hope it’s not overrun.”

Both Nik and Darin look at Nyx heavily; she shrugs in response, silent as Nikon’s hands flex restlessly on the frame of his rifle, Leilani toys with a device that she’s kept in her pocket without using for a few years now, and the sounds of invasion from both near and far echo hauntingly through the streets.

Ultimately, it’s the thumming rumble of a ship’s engine that makes the decision for him, and with an unhappy noise, Nik gestures for Nyx to take point and lead them out of the open and towards the nearest City gate.

It’s a little over an hour from where they are to the gate at as quick a pace as they can manage–which, with Darin’s injury, isn’t as fast as any of them would like–and that time frame is extended further with how they have to duck and weave through cover and alter their paths to avoid steadily growing patrols of invaders.

The screams of those unable to escape have quieted and grown farther apart. It’s not comforting.

But soon enough, they’ll be free and clear. Between two guardians, one crotchety old man, and a fiercely determined girl with a baseball bat, they’ll make it out.

At least that’s what she thinks–right up until the light goes out.


	3. Luke

Luke has heard stories from older guardians of dark times in humanity’s past. He had only been risen roughly eighty or so years ago, so he’d missed out on a good chunk of City history.

The Dark Age, the Faction Wars, the Battles of Six Fronts and Twilight Gap. Mare Imbrium, Burning Lake—he’s done enough research on his own time, read enough Cryptarchy tomes and analyses, and asked enough intensely curious questions to exasperated guardians to know this isn’t the first time the Last City on Earth has seen violence and destruction.

The Taken had been a fringe calamity, brushing just close enough to be something that could have turned ugly but stopped quickly enough that disaster had been averted. He isn’t counting that, because it could have gone _much worse_, and that’s even counting what his fireteam went through during the early stages.

This, however, is different.

Humanity is a resilient species. They’ve survived clinging to the coattails of extinction for thousands of years. Survived against impossible odds in the past. He knows this because he’s heard and read stories.

He never thought he’d be _part_ of one of those stories.

All around him fires from explosions and exposed gas lines rage, sparking electricity from snapped power lines and flickering neon lights filling the air with hair-raising static. The ground rumbles from the warzone that had descended so quickly upon them that he’s still struggling to catch up to the fact that the fight for humanity’s survival is knocking not so politely on their door.

If he looks up, he knows he’ll see the curved edge of the Traveler miles above the City center, the Consensus district shadowed by the goliath in perpetuity. It’ll be obscured by the massive plumes of choking smoke and fire that fills the air.

He doesn’t have the time to spare it a glance.

The slide of his trusty Khvostov finally clicks back into place, and Luke’s face lights up. _Got it_.

Twisting out of cover, he sights on the nearest of the advancing Cabal and fires off rapid bursts of shots that puncture alien armor. A handful of them fall before the magazine empties and he ducks back.

His shields are down to a third. Sloppy. Gil would be chastising him for not paying attention.

He slaps another magazine into place and goes to inflict more well-deserved violence on the City’s invaders—the trigger clicks hollowly.

Jammed again. Okay, maybe his trusty Khvostov isn’t _quite_ so trusty.

It’s not the first time it’s done this, but as Luke hurriedly attempts to clear the jam with no success, he thinks that it really could not have picked a _worse_ time to go full rebellious teenager on him. It’s going in time out if he survives this. There’s a really nice hand cannon he’s been eyeing…

A misplaced shot from the advancing Cabal lands somewhere to his left and he swears, instinctively flinching and lifting an arm up as it throws debris over him and does nothing to aid the whole _gun jamming_ thing.

Behind him, the two youngest kids of a family of five scream in terror at the explosion. Their mother lets out a sob and holds them close with shaking arms, the hand of her teenage son on her shoulder—the father steps up next to Luke and pops up over the cover they’re hidden behind, raising a pistol that looks like it’s seen better days.

‘_Incoming_!’ Gibson yells in the back of his head.

Dropping his jammed scout-slash-auto-slash-pulse rifle to the ground, Luke jolts upright and none-too-gently yanks the man back down.

A volley of shoulder-mounted rockets from the Cabal platoon’s colossus commander cuts through the air he’d been occupying. The kids scream even louder when those rockets slam into a nearby building and rip it apart, filling the air with cacophonous crunching and shattering glass as it collapses, shaking the ground so violently that his teeth chatter.

Fuck this.

“_Stay the fuck down_,” Luke yells at the man, unceremoneously kicking his Khvostov over towards the family just so it doesn’t wind up thrown somewhere else by the violence all around them.

It had seen him through those first few terrified and confused hours after his return from the truly dead and had gotten him to the City in one piece. Poorly timed jamming or not, he’s attached to the damn thing and isn’t letting it go.

Body flaring with crackling energy that charges the air around him, he dives out of cover and in a flash of light teleports right in front of the wave of enemies.

It catches them off-guard—giving him enough time to discharge the static that had been building within. Electricity flares, rippling over his form and flying from his open palms. The lightning of his supercharge tears through the Cabal like they’re made of paper rather than three hundred pounds of raw muscle and strength.

The charge of his light fades before it can vaporize the colossus like all of its subordinates, a short-lived final burst of it making the Cabal shudder as though he’d been tickling the damn thing rather than trying to electrocute it.

The ten-foot-tall behemoth glares down at him angrily, and the sound of its machine gun winding up pierces the air with a hair-raising whine.

“Shit,” he says flatly, pulling for the rocket launcher stashed in his inventory.

Gibson drops it into his hands. He doesn’t bother aiming as he swings it to his shoulder and squeezes the trigger.

A sucker punch of boiling pressure and heat slams into him, and every single one of his senses is ripped away in consuming flame.

When his ghost resurrects him a scant half a minute later, the colossus lays dead on the ground with a gaping hole blown in its chest. He can see a massive, dismembered arm lying nearby with a machine gun still in its grip, but he pays it no mind.

Luke shudders like a dog, his fingers, arms, and shoulders wiggling in odd dance-like motions as though he can shake off the empty abyss of sensation from being dead one instant and alive the next. Self-inflicted death happens so rarely that it’s really the only kind that unnerves him these days.

Still there? Still there. _Ick_.

Gibson wastes no time in dematting back into his light as he turns and jogs quickly back over to the family.

The mother and two young girls are shaking like leaves. The older son is doing a better job of hiding how afraid he is, probably drawing off the honestly impressive bravery of his dad—who stands and holds Luke’s Khvostov out to him.

It’s no longer jammed.

His surprised blink is lost behind the visor of his helmet, but his silence apparently tells enough because the man points at the gun and simply says, “had to fix up a few of those for a museum display in the artisan district.”

Right—this model had been common back before the Collapse.

He’s barely able to blurt out a quick _thanks_ before another explosion rocks the ground, drawing whimpers from the mother and crying girls. They need to move. “Gibson, closest evac?”

‘_There’s an emergency tram a few blocks down. I think the last shuttle just left,_’ his ghost replies privately.

Damn.

“Is the tunnel reinforced?”

‘_Yes_.’

Good enough. Bouncing on his feet for a moment, he shoulders his rifle and steps over to the kids and their mother, holding out a hand for one of them to take and speaking in a gentle tone. “I know you guys are scared, but we’ve gotta go. I’ll keep you safe and get you out of here, I promise.”

“Mommy says guardians are dangerous and not to talk to them,” says one of the two girls.

Luke stiffens, glancing at the older woman.

She’s fighting not to look ashamed of herself and can’t look him in the eyes. When she speaks, her voice shakes. “I just—my family passed down stories…”

Ah. Fifteen hundred years, six or so generations, and still the Dark Age drives a wedge between some parts of humanity and the ones fighting to protect it—all because back then, they _hadn’t_ fought for it. He understands the distrust, but it doesn’t stop the sting.

“The City’s a war zone right now and channels are in chaos. I can’t even tell if there’s a coordinated effort for evacuation,” he says. “I’m your best shot to get your family out of the City safe. Can you trust me long enough to do that?”

None of them move.

Finally, the son pats his mother on the shoulder and stands, dipping to scoop the youngest of the two girls up from the ground. The mother glances at him and then at her husband; she sniffs once, and then coaxes her other daughter up, as well.

The father nods once at him resolutely, expression softening for a moment in a wordless apology for his daughter’s words.

Luke waves it off. It’ll be more than enough if he can get this family to safety and prove that the Risen her family’s previous generations knew _weren’t_ guardians. “Stick close and follow my lead.”

The latter half of the order is delivered with a bit of wholly uncharacteristic sternness, directed at the dad, who’d stood out of cover when Luke had explicitly told him not to before. The man’s lucky decades of endless combat left guardians with quicker reflexes.

No words pass between them as Luke leads them off at a pace that’s both hurried and cautious, the family following quietly as he has them duck into cover or veer around streets and alleys blocked by debris or squadrons of Cabal.

If he hadn’t been alone while visiting the City when this invasion had begun, he’d simply gun the stray patrols down—but it _is_ just him, and he recognizes the sigil painted onto the sides of the enemy ships up above.

Red Legion. Ruthless and efficient and very, very dangerous even when considering those two factors put up against the rest of the Cabal empire. At least, according to the information the Vanguard has retrieved from stolen intel.

He’s not risking the lives of this family to play the brave hero. He might have, back before Gil’s death on the Dreadnaught, but he won’t now. He knows better.

After half a dozen blocks of silently following, the mother’s wary patience, already worn thin from fear, wears out entirely. “Do you even know where we’re going?”

“Yes.”

Her son tries to get her to shush, but she ignores him. “Aren’t you guardians supposed to keep the City safe? How did this even _happen_?”

“I don’t know.” 

And the truth of that answer frustrates Luke beyond measure. He _despises_ being out of the loop and has no idea why there’s no coordinated effort from the Vanguard to fight this invasion back. He thought he had heard Zavala over the broad channel earlier, but it had been garbled almost beyond recognition.

They’re almost to the emergency tram; he can see the entrance, descending under the City streets, on the corner up ahead.

Luke winces at the hissed shrillness in her voice when she speaks again. “But we’re supposed to _trust you_?”

“For the love of God, Julie, he’s _helping_ us,” the father snaps under his breath while Luke’s steps slow and his eyes narrow, “keep your mouth shut and let him help!”

A prickle of unease makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He’s usually too lost in his own head to really pay attention to instincts, but when Quinn and one other member of the team had saved their hides in the field more than once just by paying attention to ‘bad vibes’, he decides now is probably one of the better times to follow their example.

Confirmed a moment later when his HUD flickers red.

He stiffens. “The evac tram is up ahead. You guys need to go. _Now_.”

“What?”

The father is blinking at him when he turns around, visor lifted to the smoke-fogged sky above. His mouth opens to respond with a bit more forceful urgency—and then he sees them.

A pair of transport-class ships, larger than the weaponized Threshers the Cabal use, descend through the smoke between buildings like hawks diving for unsuspecting prey just a few hundred yards away from them.

Whether the Cabal are here for them specifically or not doesn’t matter, because the moment they hit the radar of this squadron, they’re dead anyway. “You see the sign? _Go_!” he shouts, jerking his head towards the canopy of the station below.

He doesn’t wait for them to take heed, but no shouts or footsteps follow after him as he turns and bolts back the way they had come.

His light hasn’t charged back up enough to call a storm on the platoon about to drop down on their heads, and he’d burn through all his ammo synths long before he could pick them all off. Okay, _think_—Gibson confirms the family has vanished down into the tram stop, and he presses pause.

Skidding to a halt, acutely aware of the transport ships now only a few dozen yards above his head, Luke drags his rocket launcher back out of his inventory and takes aim at the sturdy arch hovering over the tunnel entrance.

He waits until the air from the ship engines above starts to whip the tails of his coat and send the dust and debris at his feet whirling, hopes the family made it far enough inside, and then fires off a pair of rockets.

The sound of grinding stone and screeching metal is the only confirmation he gets that the tunnel collapses as he intends, because he immediately drops the now-empty launcher and spins around, bolting away just as Cabal boots hit the street and war cries echo off the buildings.

Arc energy flickers across his skin as he dives into a teleport, rolling into cover and barely missing the alien fire that boils the air he had been standing in only seconds before.

Okay, rewind and hit play again.

A lone guardian against so much heavy firepower stands no chance, reality bending superpowers and semi-immortality aside. One mistake, and both he and his ghost are dead for real.

He pops over cover to fire a hail of bullets into the nearest legionnaires, cutting down a handful of them before his magazine empties.

No Vanguard communications, or what communications are being shared are completely unintelligible. They’d had no warning, the invasion descending on the City like a crack of thunder—satellites had to have been jammed and are still being jammed. Do the Cabal ever _bother _with that kind of tactic?

He tosses an arc grenade over, bracing for the burst of explosive electricity and the howls of dying legionnaires.

Usually they’re just loud and aggressively bold. They _want_ their enemy to see them coming. They _want_ to instill terror as they conquer. They—

An undignified squawk leaves him when the cover he’s hidden behind explodes and launches him through the air; he slams into the ground and rolls, not allowing himself time to catch his breath before he shoves himself to his feet and beats a hasty retreat while taunting, alien laughter and weapons fire follows him.

_This is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad_.

What’s his goal? What does he do? Still no word from the Vanguard.

He lets out a strangled noise, ducking under a slug from one of the Cabal following him as he skids around a corner and takes cover behind solid debris. “Gibson, any word from the team?”

Gibson’s response is calm and collected despite the very decidedly _not_ calm and _not_ collected circumstances. ‘_Nothing. I’m still trying all channels, but I’m hearing nothing but static. I thought I picked up on Ion’s signature, but she went out of range before I could ping her.’_

His ghost’s response does _not_ fill him with confidence. They’re in the center of the City, the nearest evac station sealed because sometimes he _really_ does not think his plans through, he absolutely could have booked it down those stairs and _then_ sealed the entrance—

Luke reloads quickly, gathering his light into another arc grenade that he tosses at the advancing enemies and then opens fire.

‘_Wait!_’ Gibson chirps excitedly, ‘_Glyph just got in contact_.’

A rocket slams into the building above him and sends debris raining down, interrupting the brief, extremely stupid pause of panicked interest; he dives out of the way and then presses his back against the new cover provided.

Huh. That’s convenient.

He reloads again, spins out to fire on the enemy, and waits impatiently for Gibson to spit it out.

‘_It, Quinn, and another hunter are going after the command ship leading this invasion. Cayde, Ikora, and Zavala are all okay, too!_’

Luke is discomforted by the pessimistic thought that crosses his mind. They’re alright, but with this kind of force facing them, how long is that going to last? Shit, Quinn is heading directly for the head of the pack and she’s the one _most_ vulnerable to the immense danger all around.

He hates knowing that being optimistic and being naive are two wildly different things, and he’d learned that difference the hard way.

“Great,” he replies, firing on the enemy again, “is there anywhere I can meet up with them?”

Gibson is no less unhappy with the answer he gives than Luke is. ‘_I don’t think so. Amanda is flying through the mess above trying to get them to the ship, and neither of us are as good a pilot as she is._’

Well, he’s not wrong.

The sounds of legionnaires have gotten too close for comfort, and Luke decides that playing cat and mouse while he makes for the next closest evac station is just gonna have to be a _thing_. Damnit.

Unpleasantly distressed about it, he throws another grenade and then uses the miniscule window it offers him to leave the Cabal behind.

They follow, but it’s a much smaller group—that gathers up with others as they weave through the streets after him. They’re hunting for _sport_, he realizes with horror. There’s no other reason for them to so doggedly follow a lone guardian when there’s an entire city for them to tear apart.

They know they’ve won, and that realization makes his stomach turn.

Sometime during his flight the dark sky above finally opens up and the ground turns slick with rain; his Khvostov clicks on empty a handful of streets later. His sidearm a few more after that. His rocket launcher had been abandoned in haste. The next evac station is a couple of blocks away, the enemy is right on his heel, and all he has left is his light.

Electricity crackles through his body, another super ready to tear through the enemies he’s long since lost patience for. A quick glance, and he notes eagerly that there’s few enough of them that he can eliminate all in one go.

The storm within becomes the storm without and he advances on them, ready to show them exactly what happens when you don’t leave well enough alone. Bolts of arc energy fly from his hand and tear through them until only a few are left—

—and then something incorporeal slams into his chest like a raging bull and knocks the wind from him. The storm of his light vanishes, the glow of arc energy flickering out and leaving those last few enemies unscathed.

His legs give out from under him and he falls heavily to his hands and knees. Gibson flashes into sight and drops to the ground, electric blue shell unmoving and eye dim.

He has no idea what just happened, but it doesn’t take long for a working hypothesis to come to him.

_It was like a thread snapping_, he remembers Nikon telling them as he recounted the moment his old ghost had been destroyed and he’d been cut off from the Traveler. Like a thread snapping. Like being suddenly rendered deaf and blind and crippled.

The world feels murky around him, time simultaneously racing and slowing as his thoughts stutter and struggle to catch up.

He looks up at the Traveler. That odd device and the glowing net that had spread from its arms now completely encircle the source of guardians’ light.

_Light-suppression field? This isn’t a tactic the Cabal have ever used,_ he thinks, dragging in a ragged gasp of air and snatching Gibson up from the ground, his every sense dulled but instincts still very aware of the legionnaires now advancing on him like they have all the time in the world to kill him.

And maybe they do.

He’s been cut off from his light. His _ghost_ has been cut off from his light. And if he is, then so is every other guardian, whether within the City or outside of it. Distant horror builds in the back of his mind at the thought.

_How many guardians are about to die their final death_?

He scrambles back, knowing without a doubt that it’s not going to be a small number.

Humanity has survived the Collapse. It’s survived the Dark Ages, the Faction Wars, Twilight Gap and Six Fronts and the SIVA crisis, the Taken War, and so many other calamities and threats it’s laughably incomprehensible. Two thousand years of stubborn survival, and Luke fears their dumb luck has finally run out.

One of the legionnaires lifts its gun, and he braces himself for the end.

But the gun that fires doesn’t have the recognizable boom of Cabal weaponry—three cracks of miniature thunder precede each of the legionnaires shouting in shock and pain, the sound like if gunfire had been combined with nails on a chalkboard.

He watches, confused, as something corrosive eats a hole through their chests from within. All of them collapse, their considerable and now _dead_ weight rattling the loose stone around him.

Behind them stands a cloaked figure that makes his mouth drop open in shock.

He thinks he’s hallucinating at first, but if the familiar dark, well-worn armor and venom-green lined cloak, as well as the pink-spotted ghost shell—dim and silent, just like Gibson—clutched in the guardian’s hand aren’t enough proof, then the ichor-black hand cannon he holds _is_.

He’s seen the barrel of that gun up close and _very_ personal before. He couldn’t mistake it if he tried.

“_Kel_?”


	4. The Fall

“Hold on back there!”

Roland wants his ship back.

Not because Amanda Holliday is a terrible pilot, no—they’d have been shot out of the air long before now if she weren’t skilled. It’s one of the few things he respects about her.

Her consistently cheerful attitude? Pisses him off for the same reason the Hunter Vanguard’s does. The twang in her voice? Like someone taking sandpaper to the insides of his ears. Her need to fill silence with words? For someone that likes being _left the hell alone_, for someone like _him_, she’s the worst fucking kind of person to be around.

But she’s an ace pilot, and he can at _least_ appreciate that.

He wants his ship back because he knows a losing fight when he sees one, and unlike that titan that had died defending the settlement he had fled years ago, he isn’t too proud to back down from a losing fight.

He wants his ship back so he can turn tail and run to the farthest edge of the system, find a hole to bunker down in, and wait until the Darkness or the enemies of humanity or both finally take a garotte to the remnants of human civilization.

Cowardly? Sure, but at least he wouldn’t be wasting his time and effort.

Unfortunately, he’s already here, and the Red Legion’s command ship is getting larger in the viewport of Holliday’s ship, and you know what? He may as fucking well see this through until something puts him out of commission for good.

He’s just gonna be massively unpleasant about it until it happens.

His tagalong hasn’t said a word to him since they’d left Zavala behind in the plaza, seeming to have caught on to the fact that he _really_ does not want her there.

And that’s another thing that’s pissing him off. Despite the silence, she’s working alongside him flawlessly, and he, in turn, is _clicking_ with her methods and strategies.

She’s supportive where he’s offensive, evasive and distracting where he’s aggressive—and unlike what he had feared when Cayde had first foisted her off onto him, she’s perfectly content to operate in the silence he prefers. Considering who she keeps as company, he had assumed she would be obnoxiously talkative and aloof.

It’s...frustratingly refreshing. The contradiction between what he _wants_ and how he’s _feeling_ about it isn’t lost on him.

Also nice is that, despite the circumstances, she’s level-headed and calm. Even when an explosion violently rocks the hull of the ship, she barely flinches. It’s a searing contrast from the panicked muttering of his ghost in the back of his head.

Vertigo hits him as Amanda steers her ship into a tight arc underneath the command ship, the sound of pelting rain that had finally begun to fall ebbing as the massive hull fills the top of the viewport. It then empties to open sky filled with more explosions, smoke, and rain as she pulls them up and around to the unshielded rear of the ship.

He bends his knees to brace himself when she jerks the ship back to avoid a Cabal drop pod as it launches from the open port.

“Alright, guardians, time to kick ‘em where it hurts! Let us know when the shields are down and we’ll hit the ship with everythin’ we got,” she calls back to them. “Good luck!”

Both of them step towards the back, where their ghosts transmat them down to the deck below. Amanda’s ship immediately veers away and shoots off into the distance.

They’re on their own.

Roland readies his pulse rifle and glances over at Quinn; she’s waiting for him, uncaring about the rain soaking her hair and jacket, her own weapon at the ready. He thinks of Shaxx’s warning for her, and wonders if her quick willingness to follow others’ lead has anything to do with it.

No time for those questions and answers—and, ultimately, he doesn’t care. “Let’s go.”

They’re attacked as soon as they leave the open air and rain behind, following the drop pod track up into the belly of the ship and hopping across the launch rails to a higher landing. A legionnaire catches him off guard and slams into him from the side with a howl of anger, throwing him off his feet.

Its arm-mounted heated blade descends on him, but a booming shot from her hand cannon causes the massive creature to stumble to the side. Another shot puts it down. A burst of fire from his rifle takes care of a second legionnaire, and she kills the tiny psion that had turned to flee and alert its allies to the intrusion.

Both of their guns remain trained on the nearby bulkhead, waiting for the noise to attract more enemies. None come.

Letting her weapon hand drop, she steps over to him and holds out her other hand to help him to his feet; she doesn’t seem surprised or bothered when he slaps it away and stubbornly stands on his own. With a roll of her eyes, she moves towards a nearby console.

Her ghost, little even by ghost standards, white-and-blue colored and sporting an abnormal diamond-shaped shell, flashes into sight and scans the console. “No alert raised so far,” it says, “but that won’t last long. Looking for–ah, there it is!”

Its shell pops out, pleased, and then it disappears again. “_Okay, the shield generator should be at the bottom of the ship. Let’s hurry._”

He takes the lead again, following the waypoint it drops into his HUD, and they proceed relatively unhindered until their urgent path takes them out onto an open landing deck on top of the ship. Weapons fire appears in his vision as soon as the bulkhead doors hiss open; he stiffens, grabs a fistful of the hood on Quinn’s jacket, and yanks her out of the way with him.

Well, the alarm’s been raised.

“Did they muster an entire fucking _armada_ just to stop two guardians?” she hisses as he peeks out of cover and takes stock of the multiple squads of legionnaires, psions, and warbeasts, and one much larger centurion commander.

He refrains from sarcastically pointing out that they’re on their _command ship_.

They fight their way across the deck, the elements apparently choosing to set one hell of a mood and fight them as hard as the enemy does, stormy winds whipping his cloak and the tails of her jacket around violently and sheeting rain making the deck under their feet slippery.

As they make their way through the throngs of enemies, he doesn’t fail to notice that, while he’s making ample use of his light-given abilities, she’s been using nothing but tangible grenades and the solid slugs of her weapons.

This isn’t the time or the place to conserve her powers, but he says nothing. It’s not like they’re going to win this fight, anyway.

The broad channel comms crackle to life as they move deeper into the ship, and after a burst of static Zavala’s voice breaks through. “_Cayde! What’s your status?_”

“_Uh...little low on ammo. The whole flaming pistol_ _ —burning out. Anyone _ _ —from Ikora?” _Cayde’s voice is still as unconcerned as he had been back in the Tower, but mangled by steadily worsening static. Despite this, he sees a flicker of relief cross his companion’s face at the sound of it.

Zavala’s response is garbled nearly beyond recognition. “_Not since she went_ _ —the Speaker. Form up! _ _ —on me! _”

“_The interference is_–_ is getting worse, _” Ghost comments, “_I can’t tell if it’s from something the Cabal are doing, or something_–_ or something else_.”

“_What makes you think it’s something else?_” Quinn’s ghost asks, curiously.

Ghost lets out a startled beep at being addressed. “_It_–_it just_–_it registers with a weird signature. Can’t _–_can’t you tell?_”

“_No_.”

None of them respond to that; whatever it is, they’re already neck-deep in open warfare, and there’s no need to worry about stopping the interference when half the City’s population is likely dead already. Not that the Vanguard would see it that way, but unlike them, he’s pragmatic. 

Humanity is fucking doomed, anyway.

Two more roadblocks in the form of Cabal lieutenants and the squads they command stop them on their path to the shield generator. One of the two lieutenants catches Quinn off guard as they pass into a hallway, an arm the size of her torso slamming into her and sending her flying into a bit of machinery _hard_.

She recovers quickly enough to help him clear the enemies out, but it’s obvious to him that the attack caused damage. She’s winded and wincing in pain, and he waits to give her ghost time to heal her—but she waves dismissively and moves ahead of him without pause.

Suspicions flare. What is her ghost doing?

“_There_–_that’s the shield generator. Destroy the coolant fans, it should knock the ship’s shields offline,_” her ghost says over the growing roar of machinery.

They approach the end of a catwalk into a cavernous open space, where a massive, electrified turbine spins lazily in the center of the room. He leans carefully over the edge of the catwalk to spy one of the fans indicated in a nook down below.

“How the fuck do we do that?” he demands, stepping back and adjusting the grip on his gun in agitation. Those fans are twice the size of an average person—conventional weapons fire isn’t going to do shit to those things.

If he had his grenade launcher, it’d be different, but it had been in the Tower vaults, which are now nothing but scrap.

A hand appears in front of his face holding a standard fragment grenade. “Here,” Quinn says, two more held in her other hand.

He stares, slowly taking the _not_ typically guardian-issue weaponry from her. While he doubts even light would make a dent in the machinery they’re facing, its baffling to him that she won’t even _use_ hers.

Without giving him time to decide whether to ask or not, she yanks the pin on one of the two grenades she holds and then tosses it lightly over the edge, down into the first spinning fan below. Loud bangs and clangs echo as it hits the fan and bounces around within the blades.

The explosion very shortly after shakes the catwalk they’re on and sends the fan rattling violently out of control until it explodes as well. The temperature in the room jumps up immediately.

He looks at her, and she pointedly nods to the left of the circular chamber where one of the two remaining fans is.

Fucking—whatever. He doesn’t care.

She turns and hops in the opposite direction, balancing precariously along the top edge of a bunch of generators lining the walls as she makes her way across to another catwalk above a fan. He heads in the opposite direction.

Two more explosions later, and the chamber shakes even more violently as the colossal turbine in the center starts to spin faster and creak with the strain of overheating metal; the temperature in the air jumps even higher, to a degree that’s uncomfortable even within his temperature-regulating under armor.

And she’s not wearing a helmet or a completely enclosed set of armor, her upper arms bare. It must be unbearable for her.

Alarms begin to blare through the chamber, leaving his ears ringing.

“_Heat levels rising! It’s working!_” her ghost cheers, and Roland wonders what the fuck it has to be cheerful about when they still have an entire army to contend with even _if_ this ship falls.

An emergency bulkhead opens up on the side of the room opposite where they had entered, and onto the catwalk steps another centurion—the sharp whine of a fusion rifle discharging over the sound of the turbine pierces the air, and the centurion vaporizes.

Both of them cross the empty space between their perches to the catwalk and quickly leave the room behind, not eager to be front and center when the turbine fails from overheating.

“_Shield_–_shields are down!_” Ghost calls out.

His ghost’s announcement is followed by excited trilling from hers, and in the corner of his HUD he sees it open up the broad Vanguard channel. “_Zavala, we did it! The command ship’s shields are down!_”

Nothing but static answers it.

"_Zavala?_” it asks, excitement vanishing quickly while resigned dread rises within him. “_Amanda, we’re headed topside!_”

Glancing at each other, he and Quinn rush ahead, following the waypoint given to him and making their way quickly back up through the ship. The broad channel remains open, and the sounds of nothing but static and garbled combat persist.

“_Amanda? Anyone?!_”

They pass through bulkhead after bulkhead while both of their ghosts attempt to connect to _someone_ without success.

One more door slides open before them, and they leave the ship interior for the open air of another deck, rain pelting them relentlessly while in the distance below the City burns. The command ship has drifted closer to the Traveler in the time it took them to move through it, and that strange device that Roland had seen before is now gargantuan in his vision.

The shimmering net stretching between its sharp claws now completely covers the surface of the dormant Traveler, and it strikes him with gut-twisting fear. With a glance to his right, he finds it’s a feeling that’s shared by his companion.

Empathy hasn’t ever been his strong suit, but for the first time in a very long time, he takes comfort in knowing that he isn’t _alone. _Not in this.

Their ghosts flash into sight between them, shells twitching and spinning, distressed beeps and trills leaving Ghost and her own ghost remaining in a horrified silence. “How do we come back from this…?” it asks, voice full of uneasy despair.

“You _don’t_,” someone growls from behind them.

They spin around in alarm and are met with the sight of what—_who_—has to be the leader of this invasion. A massive Cabal, bald head bare save for the rebreather mask or whatever it is it wears, polished white armor with wing-like protrusions on the back gleaming in the oppressive shimmer from the net around the Traveler.

It’s flanked by two more Cabal, but neither of them hold a fraction of the intimidating presence as their leader.

The leader’s red eyes are burning, intense, and focused solely on the two of them; it’s such a menacing glare that not even their ghosts move to dematerialize to safety.

The two flanking their leader stop, but the heavy _thumps_ of the one in white armor continue forward. He stops a handful of feet away, and only then does his paralyzing stare leave them, following the gesture he makes at the caged Traveler. “Welcome to a world without light.”

A flash bursts from the strange device latched onto the Traveler, spreading outwards across the net that encloses it.

A cold fist clamps down around Roland’s chest, his vision going white and senses flaring like a flashbang had just erupted in front of him. His lungs burn as she struggles to drag air into his lungs, and when his sight finally clears he realizes that whatever had happened had brought him to his knees.

His rifle lays on the ground next to him, and next to it—

Ghost’s eye is dark and his gray-green shell rests, unmoving, next to the dropped weapon.

Sucking in a breath, his heart hammering in alarm and terror, Roland snaps a hand out to grab Ghost and pull his companion close. Ghost is silent, and Roland can’t feel his light. Had this Cabal just...cut them off from the _light_?

He looks up, eyes settling on Quinn—she stands next to him, eyes wide, completely unaffected by what had knocked the breath from him. Her ghost has vanished, but he can’t see it on the ground. Is it unaffected, too?

Who _is_ she? _What_ is she?

He isn’t the only one that notices her lack of reaction.

The Cabal turns on her slowly and with narrowed eyes; she snaps out of her daze and lifts her gun at the ready. The white-armored Cabal slaps it out of her hand before she can fire off a shot, sending it clattering away until it slides off the edge of the ship.

_ Move _, he thinks, gritting his teeth and reaching for his own rifle.

Something heavy slams into him with the force of a raging titan, and he flies back with a wash of dizzying static through his head. He rolls to a stop near the edge—but Ghost slips from his fingers and bounces away, dropping off and following Quinn’s gun to the City below.

“Do not _look_ at me, creature!” the Cabal roars at him, the absolute fury of his words chilling. With another movement that’s unnervingly agile for a creature of his size, he turns and swings at Quinn again when she pulls her hand cannon out.

He doesn’t even see the second gun go flying. A choked yelp leaves her mouth at the blow as she sails back, rolling towards the edge just as he had. Unlike him, she actually goes _over_, barely managing to catch herself and desperately scrabbling at the platform to keep from falling.

“You are weak. Undisciplined. Cowering behind walls. Your kind never deserved the power you were given. _I_ am Ghaul, and your light is now _mine_,” the Red Legion’s commander growls lowly, looking between the two of them with burning disdain and hatred.

He struggles to get to his feet and only manages to rise to his knees. Ghaul towers over him, and likely would even if all six feet of Roland could stand properly. As it is, all he can do is stare up at the alien twice his size, limbs like lead and teeth bared behind is helmet, cursing his past self for even bothering to return to the City when he had _known_ something was wrong.

He wants his ship back.

He should have high-tailed it to the outer rim the moment those first few approach squawks had gone unanswered.

He had thought Ghaul looked hateful before, but it’s nothing compared to the look he’s fixed with now. Suddenly, it’s obvious to him why they’re losing. Why they’ve _lost_. Why this conquering monster is looking down at him like he represents everything wrong with Earth-dwellers.

He’s seen all of this before, in a small settlement called Carran.

He remembers standing aside while a vicious, sadistic bastard murdered a guardian’s ghost and killed him in cold blood. Remembers a little girl’s despairing scream. People slaughtered like animals. And he had watched it all happen without lifting a finger, despite his discomfort with it, because it had been better than having that bastard’s attention on _him_.

Complacency. Cowardice.

He’d run from the past and hidden it away, pretending it would never come back to bite him in the ass. Pretending he could wash the blood off his hands by being a good samaritan. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t just fled when he’d seen this invasion descending on the City like a pack of hungry wolves.

He’d thought he could make a difference.

Arrogance.

He almost laughs.

He’s no guardian. He doesn’t know why he ever bothered to pretend he was.

“You’re not brave. You’ve merely forgotten the fear of death.” Ghaul leans over him, baleful stare boring holes into him, ignorant to how Roland silently agrees. “Allow me to _reacquaint _you.”

A massive foot connects with him like a bolt of lightning. Quinn yells something he can’t make out.

The next thing he knows is freefall, and somewhere on his journey to solid ground he blacks out.


	5. Exodus

“Hey.”

He’s not alive. A fall from the height he remembers, without a ghost to revive him, isn’t survivable even for a guardian. Even if he had, he knows he’d be aching all over, probably unable to breathe properly let alone _move_.

He feels nothing. Just hazy as though in a fog. Numb. Exhausted.

“Hey! Wake up!” the voice he’s hearing, some kind of afterlife fever dream, calls again.

C’mon. He’s fucking _dead_. Just let him stay that way, for fuck’s sake. Not like he hasn’t wanted this for a while.

A spike of pain suddenly hits him and his head jerks to one side—he jolts to full awareness with a gasp that immediately jabs a thousand knives through his chest and midsection, and his expression twists in a grimace. 

Ah, there are the aches and pains.

Damnit. Guess he’s still alive.

One eye opens, and it takes a moment for his blurry vision to clear and reveal long blonde hair and stormy gray eyes. Quinn. She must have removed his helmet, if the genuine sting pulsing on his cheek is anything to go by. “Did you just fucking slap me?”

“I sure the fuck did,” she confirms cheerily, patting him lightly on the chest. “Welcome back to the land of the living, asshole. We need to go. Now.”

As he struggles to push himself up off the ground, her ghost darts back. Where is his ghost?

Where is _he_, for that matter? He looks around, taking in the sight of dirty floors and shattered glass windows, a caved in ceiling on the opposite side of whatever dark room they’re in. Eyes fixated on the sizeable hole, he wonders in delirious amusement whether he’d fallen through it.

An explosion reverberates through the City streets; she tenses and looks back, the strands of hair that had come loose from the loose knot at the back of her neck falling from her shoulders.

Suddenly, he remembers exactly what had happened prior to his dirt nap. The City is being invaded, ripped apart by the Cabal. People are being slaughtered. His ghost is lost somewhere, light gone. _His_ light is gone.

Questions form in his head, uncaring of the painful, protesting ache they cause. How had he survived that fall? How had the Cabal not killed him in his prone state? Maybe _not_ the most important, however, is— “You didn’t lose your light. How?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you once we get out of the City.” The look she gives him is guarded.

He scoffs, wincing at the stab of pain in his midsection. Spying his discarded helmet nearby, he grabs it with a scowl and slips it back on. Of course she’d be dodgy. “Fine. How did I survive that fall?”

“I jumped off and caught you in time,” she answers, shifting restlessly and glancing away again at the sounds of screams and gunfire. The second half of that answer—that she used her light to stop their momentum—goes unspoken.

“Why?”

With how badly he’s still injured, she _has_ to have been hurt, too. How is it she seems perfectly fine? Especially when, as far as he can tell, her ghost isn’t healing her.

The question clearly surprises her, and she stares at him. “Because you would have _died_?”

He returns her stare silently, unable to find the words to respond. It’s such a simple answer and yet baffles him to the core. He’s been an absolute _ass_ to her—and is completely unapologetic about it, even now—since Cayde had ordered them to team up.

Usually, when he’s a jackass to someone, they get the fucking picture and leave him the fuck alone.

She doesn’t know him. She doesn’t even know his _name_. Yet she’d saved his life just..._because_?

Shit. He supposes he owes her a name, at bare _minimum_. “Roland,” he blurts out.

She blinks, then her eyes light up with realization. It’s short-lived. “Nice to officially meet you, but we _really_ need to go. More Cabal are starting to sweep this sector.”

Right. Invasion.

Grimacing, he slowly pushes himself to his feet. Every moment, big and small, is accompanied by so much pain it leaves him breathless. He can’t even stand fully upright, back hunched and an arm wrapped around his middle as though it can somehow stave away the aches.

“We’re both unarmed. My ghost is dead. Do you _really_ think we’re going to make it out alive?” he hisses, taking a single step on a shaky leg that nearly gives out.

She’s grabbing his arm and slipping it around her shoulders before he can protest, and with her own arm around his back and her hand holding onto his wrist, he doesn’t have the strength to pull away even though he tries.

At his attempts, she shoots him a look. “We’re damn well going to try, and your ghost isn’t dead.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’ve got a feeling. Trust me.”

Another optimist. Great.

He moves slowly even with her help, fire burning through his nerves as he forces himself to move ahead. The constant dips and divots in the ground don’t help, frequently throwing him off balance and making the pain worse.

Not to mention nearly dragging _her_, who’s a whole foot smaller than him, to the ground under his weight.

He hasn’t seen what it’s like down here—fires rage all around, scorch marks from them and weaponry painting violent stories across the buildings and wrecked vehicles and streets. Bullet holes riddle every surface, ground is overturned and the rubble of what had once been sidewalks crunch under their feet.

The street they're on now is completely destroyed, the wall of a canal it ran alongside having collapsed. What water had been in the canal is mostly gone, and he can only assume that somewhere the tunnels under the City had caved in and left it all to drain underground.

Save for the fires and the thrum of distant engines, the City is eerily quiet compared to what he remembers before waking up.

She steers him towards the decline down to the canal, collapsed buildings and debris around them blocking them from continuing through the streets. It’s probably for the best; in his condition he wouldn’t stand a chance against enemies.

“Hard to imagine,” he grunts as she helps him down the steep slope, dirt crumbling and flowing down under their weight, “that so much damage can happen in a few hours.”

No response comes at first, and he’s perfectly fine with the silence, assuming she’s either agreeing with him or simply has nothing to say. The soft response he does get nearly knocks him off his feet again. “You’ve been out for two days.”

He stops moving, forcing her to stop as well, and stares at her. Two _days_? “Why the fuck did you _stay_?”

She gives him another look that he’s beginning to realize is her _stop being a fucking dumbass_ stare, and tugs him into motion again.

“_The light is gone,_” her ghost’s voice crackles in through his helmet, solemn and distressed, “_they’ve taken the City, the Traveler...everything. The Red Legion is slaughtering powerless guardians. Civilians. Anyone that hasn’t already fled.”_

The knowledge fills him with a cold feeling that he’s not sure how to describe. For centuries, guardians have been used to the idea that they’re effectively immortal. Death is temporary. Their light makes them adaptable and damn near unstoppable.

Now the light is gone, and all he can think of is how these City-dwelling guardians, used to feeling invincible, used to charging straight ahead with damn near suicidal tactics at times, are stuck in a situation where they have to switch gears quickly or _die_. Permanently.

And if her ghost’s words are anything to go by, they’re not adapting to mortality very well.

The deep thrum of engines he had heard before grows louder and an unnatural wind whips through the area as they pass under a collapsed bridge, right before a blinding spotlight sweeps over the nearby buildings and streets above their heads.

His muscles and what are probably several broken bones protest angrily when they both quickly duck behind cover, barely avoiding the seeking light.

The thresher it comes from moves on, and they cautiously continue, moving around and under debris. Her choice to lead them down into the canal is more than just out of necessity, he realizes; all of the City canals wind towards the walls, and they have more cover down below than if they were in the streets.

It’s as they’re approaching another bridge, waiting for a group of marching enemies and one of the Cabal’s terrifyingly powerful Goliath tanks to pass, that a small light floating above the ground draws their eyes.

A dim beam sweeps the canal from a tiny orb. It almost looks like—

“Guardian?” Ghost calls out, loudly enough to be heard but just quiet enough that the tank’s engines render it silent to their enemies. His voice is strained and distorted. “Roland?”

Holy shit, she had been _right_.

He pulls away from Quinn’s support and darts ahead—regretting the action when pain flares and he stumbles to the ground. It causes enough noise and motion to draw Ghost’s attention.

His ghost flits over to him, slower than usual, and he almost groans with relief when healing light flows through him. It takes longer than he remembers, but once Ghost is finished, he’s able to stand on his own again.

Still weak, still hurt, still without powers, but mobile. He supposes that’s enough.

“You’re—you’re alive. I t-thought I’d lost you,” Ghost murmurs, eagerly following when Roland reaches for him. He’s been a nervous and easily startled little thing ever since Carran, but Roland doesn’t think he’s ever seen him openly shivering with fear as he is now.

He didn’t know ghosts _could_ shiver with fear, but here Ghost sits in his open palm, shell shaking and cracked eye blinking rapidly.

Ghost glances behind him and he turns, eyes lighting on Quinn standing quietly nearby and watching the exchange. He expects her to say _I told you so_, but instead she just looks relieved.

Why does she care?

“I can heal you, but—but I can’t resurrect you. Not since…” Ghost trails off. He knows his only real friend well enough to tell he’s unwilling to finish, trying not to remind himself of what had happened.Without saying anything else, Ghost demats into his light.

He inhales deeply, taking a moment to relish in the ability to breathe without feeling like he’s being stabbed by a dozen arc blades. “Well,” he mutters to Quinn, reaching for the sidearm on his belt only to remember that it’s gone, “looks like you’re the only one of the two of us that’ll be walking away from being dead.”

She winces. “I wouldn’t count on that.”

Shaxx’s warning again floats through his mind. “What are you?”

“The easy answer is ‘a guardian’,” she replies, just shy of impatient as she starts forward again.

“And the complicated one?”

“I don’t know.”

He starts to call her on the bullshit reply before seeing the flicker of discomfort and frustration in her expression. She’s being serious. It shuts him up, but it certainly doesn’t stop his growing curiosity; he may hate people, but he hasn’t survived this long without knowing every possible variable he can.

They keep moving, silent and cautious as the Red Legion combs the streets around them for survivors, reaching the wall after hours of slow but steady movement.

It awes him—just a bit—that his usual horrendously shitty luck had taken an alternate turn, because at the end of the canal they’d stuck to is a massive hole blasted into the wall, collapsed rubble forming a sort of incline up and out of the City.

She moves ahead, hopping up on a pulse of light and landing halfway up the rubble to test its stability, and then nods at him to say it’s okay. Precarious, more likely than not, but okay.

The jagged and uneven path through the wall and out of the City is no less a struggle for him to maneuver through. Healed or not, he’s still in an uncomfortable amount of pain and more exhausted than he should be—he can probably chalk that up to the loss of his light.

Unlike their dynamic during the assault, she takes the lead and remains ahead of him as they leave the City behind. He finds himself spacing out the farther they go, until she lets out a hissed breath and he looks up again.

She’s looking down into a small ravine, and before he can catch up she’s sliding down the incline to the ground below.

When he joins her, he understands her reaction.

Her ghost flashes into sight to look around at the handful of charred and still bodies, quietly distressed noises leaving it. “These guardians...they had no way to defend themselves. The Cabal aren’t just searching the City to keep hold of it, they’re—”

“—hunting for sport,” he finishes, a ripple of unease climbing up his spine.

These Cabal are different from any the Vanguard has encountered before. Their militaristic empire hasn’t ever cared about capturing the Traveler, just destroying it to neutralize guardian forces; in a way, they’ve succeeded on that front. They care about _winning_, to the point they’ll blow up entire planets just for getting in their way.

‘Sport’ isn’t a word in their dictionary. They crush, they conquer, they move on to the next conquest.

Shit. Valen would get along with these guys.

Pushing the vastly unpleasant thought aside, he scours what had once been a sheltered camp for weapons and supplies. A battered submachine gun and some ruined weapon parts are uncovered underneath a mangled body, and Ghost dismantles the spare parts to reassemble them into ammo.

Now armed, he feels _slightly_ better as they move on. Slightly.

Their travel through the mountains and hills outside of the City is arduous and winding, ambushes by various Cabal parties forcing them to backtrack and change course. They have no destination in mind save for _anywhere but here_, and as the days pass the rogue Cabal scouts get fewer and far between and they get further and further from what had been home.

A little over a week into their journey, Quinn’s easy and quick pace starts to slow and her movements become unsteady.

It takes him hours to realize why—he hadn’t really thought anything of her taking quiet moments to eat on the go and while they find shelter for the evenings when the mountain winds grew too frigid to continue. He hasn’t seen her do either in days.

Another quirk of her difference from other guardians? He adds what he assumes is a more human-like endurance and physical requirements to his unanswered question of what in the _actual_ fuck she is.

Another few days after that, he stops, gaze fixated on a snow-covered boulder wedged against a towering rock formation ahead; Quinn bumps into his back and the crunch of snow underfoot ceases. He frowns, glancing back at her.

She gives him an apologetic look that flickers away quickly, replaced by a weariness that has long since surpassed his own despite his lack of empowering light and her retention of it. Her skin has taken on a worrying pallor and her breathing is more labored than it should be for the slow but steady pace they’re moving at.

Worry that he’s not used to swirls in his chest. Between his time with a monster that stole supplies from slaughtered settlements and travelers, and then life in the City, he hasn’t ever had to consider _hunting_ for food.

It hasn’t ever been a concern for him to know the physical limits of humans—if his suspicion about her is correct—until now, and he isn’t sure how much longer she can go without food.

“_That falcon,_” Glyph’s voice on the comms interrupts his studying stare, and points his attention back to the reason he had stopped moving in the first place, “_we keep running into it. Is it following us?_”

He refrains from answering. The bird lets out a cry as though in response, then flaps its wings and takes off, veering conspicuously into the path they’ve been following through the mountain. For a beat, the only sound is the quiet whispering of the cold wind.

Glyph’s thinking along the same lines he is. “_Or are _we_ following _it_?_”

Heedless, they continue on, spotting the bird a few more times over the next few days as they do. He has a growing suspicion that Glyph’s assumption is the correct one—confirmed a few hours later when the bird’s lead brings them to a high ledge on the other side of the mountain range.

A handful of meters below them and a dozen more farther ahead in a flat clearing are a group of hovering jumpships, beat to hell and back and sorely needing fresh coats of paint, as well as a small, milling crowd of what looks like survivors.

Civilian and guardian alike.

Quinn nods at him when he turns back to check on her, her expression still weary but full of open relief.

He steps forward and carefully ambles down the steep slope out of the ravine and into the clearing, expecting that she’ll simply hop down with her light. There’s a tell-tale sound of a light pulse, but the dull noise of a body hitting the ground and a soft cry of pain immediately follow, making him spin around.

She’s pushing herself upright on shaky limbs, but stumbles right back to her knees after getting to her feet.

Hesitating, he swears under his breath and has Ghost pull his appropriated weapon into his inventory, dropping down next to her so he can hoist her up into his arms. He’s not used to giving a damn about someone, but if she’s going to risk her own ass to save _his_ worthless one, he may as well reciprocate.

“I’m fine, put me down,” she mutters as he sets off towards the group.

“Shut the fuck up,” he snaps.

Glyph flashes into sight and flits off ahead of them, gathering the attention of a figure wearing—is that a fucking _poncho_? It turns out to be a woman, her russet-skinned features sharp and hawklike. Fitting, considering the falcon they had followed here comes to rest on her gloved arm.

She turns in his direction as he approaches, dark eyes taking in the sight of his battered armor and tattered cloak, and the limp woman in his arms. “She injured?”

Straight to the point, no pleasantries. He can appreciate that.

“She hasn’t had anything to eat in days. I usually keep some rations on hand for her while in the field, but the attack caught us off guard and I didn’t…” Glyph’s answer trails off.

“Not your fault, little guy.” Adjusting the rifle slung over her shoulder, she reaches her free hand out to gingerly pat the top of Glyph’s shell like it’s a kicked puppy. “Thought guardians had a bit more endurance than just a measly couple of days, though.”

The explanation of her _not_ being a guardian—or what he knows to be one, anyway—is bit back. She’d been hesitant to reveal to him what little she already has, so he assumes he needs to keep his mouth shut.

Her eyebrow lifts at the conspicuous silence from him and Glyph, but she shrugs. “Are you travel-ready, at least? These rickety ol’ jumpships only have so much room, and my people are prioritizing the injured and civilians.”

“You’ve got somewhere safe?” he asks.

An unhappy look accompanies the sigh she lets out. “Safe as you can get, world like this.”

Stupid question.

“Hawthorne!” Two sets of eyes and one bulb focus on a figure standing next to one of the idle jumpships with its ramp still lowered. “We’re almost full, we’ve gotta make a run back to the Farm.”

“Got room for one more?” she calls back, and when she receives a confirming nod, she turns back to him. “Get her loaded up. My people will take care of her, the rest of us will follow on foot. The Farm’s a few days out at a steady pace. Think you can manage?”

“I have a choice?”

She gives him a sarcastic grin that makes him rethink his ability to tolerate her. “Nope.”


	6. Quinn

“For someone that survived that mess of a situation in the City, you don’t look very happy.”

Quinn stiffens, turning as the sound of boots crunching through dirt and grass approaches from behind. Suraya Hawthorne is a shrewd, sharp woman, exactly as observant and intelligent as Ikora Rey, and it’s for this reason she isn’t very happy to see her being the origin of that statement.

Which is terrible considering neither she nor Roland would be alive right now if it weren’t for her picking them up.

She’s happy about _that_, obviously, but there’s a reason she had wandered away from the Farm—she needs time to think and gather herself and to stay away from people asking her how she’s doing.

It had taken her a week to recover and get back up to strength from the journey here (Glyph is probably going to be a nervous Nancy about keeping food on hand, now), and during that time she gotten tired of hearing medics asking to check on her and having no peace to sort through what had happened.

A ripple of weariness rolls through her at the thought; she can’t decide if it’s from the magnitude of those events or from not actually being back to _full_ strength. Maybe both. “That’s because I’m not.”

“You’re alive,” Hawthorne says, stopping next to her on the rocky outcropping she had found a ways away from the Farm, “isn’t that enough of a reason to be relieved, at least?”

A loud, shrieking caw interrupts her response as Hawthorne’s feathered companion, Louis, joins them, landing on a nearby post wedged into the ground. The bird seems to stare at her, wings fluttering, and she gets the sense that he’s judging her.

Or maybe she’s just picking those vibes up from Hawthorne.

Exhaling, she returns her attention to the other woman. “I’m alive. Doesn’t mean the people I care about are.”

“Still not used to losing people, huh?” Her head cocks to one side and her ams cross. The stare she fixes on Quinn isn’t necessarily harsh, but rather focused and studying.

This is definitely more than just small talk. She keeps her distance from most Farm activity out of guilt that she’s the only one that still has her light and is the only one that’s _used_ to being as vulnerable as other guardians are now, and it probably hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Plus, she’d been rendered weak on their exodus from the City, and though every other guardian had fully recovered from injury or weakness by this point, she’s still in the process.

Even having known Hawthorne for a short time, it’s obvious that Hawthorne takes her duty to keep the people of the Farm safe. She wants to know all the variables she’s dealing with, and even within the City, Quinn had been one _hell_ of a variable.

She considers the idea of just coming clean and explaining to Hawthorne why she’s different—and ultimately discards it. It’s a secret that’s been kept restricted to her fireteam and Vanguard operation leaders alone, and without their input, it’s probably best to keep it close to the chest.

Her head shakes. “I haven’t.”

And she doesn’t want to, either. The idea of never again seeing her teammates or—

She winces sharply and swats the thought away like a fastball special, slamming the door behind it and locking it down tighter than the Cryptarch vaults.

“Look,” she says, “I appreciate you helping me and Roland find our way here, and for helping all the refugees, but if you don’t mind I’d really rather be al—”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

She freezes at the interruption, blinking owlishly at Hawthorne. “Excuse me?”

Hawthorne’s steady gaze borders on chastisement, one of her eyebrows lifted. “I’ve seen the same kind of look in your eyes before. You’re trying to convince yourself you’d rather be alone to distance yourself from more loss.”

Not being sure how to respond to that—because it’s _true_—keeps her quiet. Staring at her in discomfort, she wishes she was even a small percentage better at hiding how she’s feeling, because Hawthorne had just hit the nail on the head so quickly it’s disorienting.

“I’ve been out here in the wilds guiding people without the protection of City walls for years, you know how many walking tragedies I’ve seen?” Hawthorne asks, walking past her to stand next to her feathered companion and reaching out a gloved hand to give the bird a few gentle strokes. “People who’ve lost so much, so fast, that they’re afraid to reach out and have it ripped away again.”

“I’m not a walking tragedy,” Quinn mutters under her breath.

“Didn’t say you were,” she replies, breezily. She refuses to elaborate further, and Quinn isn’t sure whether that irritates her more than an explanation would.

Glyph flashes into sight, and she turns to it with her stomach twisting into knots.

It’s giving in to exactly what Hawthorne had pinpointed in words, but after everything she’s been through and how little connection she has to this world she woke up in, she really is afraid of losing what gives her that connection. “Please tell me you’ve heard something.”

“I’m sorry,” it says softly, shell drooping in unhappiness, “everything is dark after the Cabal took the Traveler. A few blips on the radar here and there, but...nothing concrete.”

“‘Blips’?” Her voice cracks on the single word, and she feels a painful lurch of hope in her chest.

Motion in her periphery lets her know Hawthorne has moved up to stand at her side again, and there’s a neutral kind of consideration on her face.

Glyph hesitates, glancing between her and Hawthorne. “I...I _thought_ I caught Gibson’s signature, but only for a few seconds.”

“Gibson? Luke’s ghost?” She sucks in a breath at Glyph’s answering chirp of confirmation. “Where?”

“Quinn—”

She won’t hear it. Not when there’s a chance. Her team, Glyph, and C—her team is all she’s got in this world. She _needs_ them. “If Luke is still alive, I’m not going to just stand here and wait. Guardians don’t have their light anymore, and we don’t know how far the Red Legion has been tracking survivors. He might need help.

“You realize that includes _you_, too?” Hawthorne cuts in before Glyph can voice its protest, stepping forward a bit. “I’ve never lost anyone under my charge before—you’re staying here.”

It again crosses her mind to reveal that she hasn’t lost her light, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s just as vulnerable as everyone else now is, so she and her ghost remain silent in the face of the rhetorical question.

They glance at each other.

“I can’t just stand here and hope my team makes it here okay—” she tries again after a pause, frustrated.

“_—which_ is why I’m going to take a few of my scouts and try to find him,” Hawthorne says with lifted eyebrows. She turns to Glyph. “Ghost, where’d you pick up that signature?”

She wants to argue, to try and at the very least weasel her way into going with; at this point, weeks after the fall of the City and still weak from too long without being able to eat, she’s willing to concede to the order so long as it means a chance of seeing a member of her fireteam still alive.

When Glyph glances at her with a questioning trill, she nods.

“...eight-point-seven miles northeast of here,” it finally says.

“How long ago?”

“Three hours.”

Three hours, almost ten miles out. Heading straight for the Farm at a slow pace, that’d take him maybe four hours—but people have been trickling in over the course of a week, a limited number of scouts meaning most refugees are wandering and seeking shelter anywhere they can.

Hawthorne looks thoughtful. “He took a long way around if he’s in the northeast hills,” she says, whistling sharply and watching Louis take flight and head off into the distance.

“Maybe the Cabal were tracking him,” she suggests, though the idea makes her skin crawl with worry; out of all of them, Luke has been through the most in such a short period. The last thing he needs is to be alone, stalked by the enemy, and potentially injured on top of it.

“Maybe. I’m going to grab my scouts and head out. _You,_” Hawthorne says, lifting her eyebrows at her this time, pointing at her and then jabbing that finger at the ground like a scolding mother, “stay here.”

Quinn says nothing. Hawthorne takes it as an affirmative, nods, and sets off back to the Farm, leaving her alone at last.

Turning back to the vista stretched out in front of her beyond the cliffside, her eyes settle on the distant view of a colossal, half-dome-like structure that sparks with some kind of energy. No idea what it is, but the flickering energy should be mesmerizing enough to let her return to sorting through her thoughts.

Unfortunately, now she’s too anxious to find the same kind of solemn peace she had before Hawthorne’s interruption.

Glyph gives her a moment before it speaks up. “You know she’s right.”

“I do,” she replies with a heavy sigh, unfolding her arms and heading back to the Farm herself. “It’s pissing me off.”

It gives her an apologetic chirp and merges with her light.

The sights and sounds of the Farm are getting stale quickly. She can’t tell if it’s because of the stress of not knowing or from a lack of things for her to do. She’s done some assisting in setting up tents and lean-tos for the refugees and surviving guardians and helped move supplies into storage being brought in from other settlements Hawthorne’s got contacts within, but with the stream of newcomers having thinned out, those tasks are fewer and far between.

Hawthorne isn’t too strict about keeping people confined to the settlement, despite her unhappiness when people have opted to venture back out—which isn’t often. People are shaken as badly as she had been after being rescued from the Dreadnaught.

Safety in numbers, though that hadn’t done a whole lot of good for the City.

She avoids gazes as she moves through the ramshackle settlement of dilapidated buildings, some refurbished from old standing structures and others built new out of whatever parts and resources people had been able to get their hands on.

Across the way, hiding from anyone and everyone he can under the dark awning of one of these buildings, she spies Roland; the sharp blue accents of his jet black armor gives him away, despite attempting to remain out of sight.

He notices her when she’s a few yards away and gives her a look like he’s hoping she’ll change her mind.

She doesn’t.

She hasn’t seen him since he arrived here a few days after her, between her recovery and stress fits that send her wandering, as well as his own recovery from injuries that his ghost didn’t have the energy to heal all at once, and he’d been wearing his helmet the entire time they’d made their way here.

The pretty face is a direct contrast to his standoffish and angry personality; long features and narrowed eyes, a prominent brow, thin nose, and a sharp jaw with unshaven scruff. Short, black hair, cut shorter on the sides.

Actually, she changes her mind—the sharp features match perfectly to the angry, brooding look on his face.

“Never got the chance to thank you for helping me get out of the City,” he says when she stops in front of him, sounding very much like he wishes he didn’t have to. There’s a subtle accent that colors his voice that she can’t place, noticing it now that there’s nothing else to distract her from it.

“And I never got the chance to thank you for helping me get here. You don’t need to. Cayde—” The name causes her throat to seize up and her expression to contort with pain. _Get it together, Quinn_. “Cayde gave me an order, I followed it, and I’d be a shitty person if I just left you behind.”

He looks distinctly uncomfortable at the reply, gaze shifting away from her and hand lifting to scratch the back of his neck. He’s silent, mouth opening once or twice as he searches for words he’s clearly not good at. He grimaces. “I wouldn’t worry about Cayde. The rat bastard’s too much of a pest to die.”

“‘Rat bastard’?” she parrots.

“Not a fan,” he grouses, apparently much more comfortable with negativity. “Why are you still talking to me?”

Her brow furrows. “Am I not supposed to be talking to my teammate?”

The angry expression vanishes in the wake of genuine surprise—but gives way just as quickly for aggravation. “We’re out of the City. You’re not my teammate anymore. Orders are done.”

“You…” She blinks at the response, nose wrinkling at the aggression. Then, she fixes a cheery smile on her face, forced or not, and says, “too fucking bad, asshole. We’re friends and you’re stuck with me now.”

She saved his life and he saved hers. Like it or not, she’s going to consider him part of her team and there’s not a damn thing he can do to stop it. She’s stubborn like that.

His lip curls, but if he intends to say something even more scathing to try and block her out, he isn’t given the chance to.

“Quinn!” a familiar voice calls, and she feels her heart fill to burst with immediate joy. Leilani crashes into her with enough force that she stumbles back a few steps and nearly loses her balance, and her arms go around her shoulders.

Over the younger (and yet _taller_, damnit) girl’s shoulder she can see Nikon and Nyx approaching, the former looking relieved and the latter with a rapidly flashing jaw light speaking the same kind of joy she’s feeling.

Quinn hugs Leilani tightly and with a beaming smile at her teammates, failing to notice the way Roland has gone completely rigid next to her.

She does, however, notice when Nik stops dead in his tracks and his eyes focus sharply to her left, the relieved expression he wears vanishing. He looks stunned, and with a pat of her hands on Leilani’s shoulders, she backs away from the hug; confusion replaces her relief as burning rage replaces his shock.

Next to her, Roland mutters, “shit.”

“You son of a fucking _bitch_,” Nik snaps, breaking into a sprint that speaks of rapidly impending aggression.

Her eyes widen, and with lightning-quick reflexes, she grabs Roland by the elbow and drags him through a warp just as Nikon bull-rushes right through where he had been standing. Light or not, the force of a charging titan in full plate would have _flattened_ him.

“Nik, what the fuck,” she demands, ignoring the fact that Roland is easily a head taller than her when she yanks him behind her to stand between her inexplicably raging fireteam leader and new hunter ally.

He’s not the only one that looks furious, she notices—Nyx’s facial plates have shifted into open anger, and, mirroring her and Roland, is now standing between _them_ and _Leilani_. A few people nearby have stopped to watch out of shock and confusion.

“Get out of the way, Quinn,” Nikon barks, the order delivered with far more authority than she’s ever heard him use.

She stands her ground, wary of the flicker in his expression that implies he may be fully willing to trample _her_ just to get to Roland. What the fuck is going on? “No.”

“Quinn—”

“_No_,” she repeats, firmly, glancing between him and Nyx. “What the fuck is your problem? How do you know Roland?”

The name makes Nik’s face twist with even uglier fury. “He was part of the group that raided Carran, slaughtered everyone, and almost killed me. Out. Of. The. Way. _Now_.”

The heat of that repeated order sends a wave of goosebumps over her skin. He’s quickly running out of his characteristic patience, and considering the short explanation, she can understand why. Her wary feeling shifts instead to Roland, but she still refuses to move.

She turns to him with narrowed eyes, acutely aware of the threat of a _very angry_ titan at her back.

His demeanor, from the expression on his face to the set of his shoulders and posture, tells her half of what she needs to know. Nikon’s telling the truth, and Roland is guilty of the heartbreaking story her team leader had told all of them not long after assuming command.

It’s the open resignation and weariness, as well as a few key words in Nik’s explanation that keeps her in between him and her fireteam. “Did you participate in what happened?”

“I was there,” he answers.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Roland glances between her and the three across from them, brow furrowing. He’s confused, and she knows the longer the seconds tick by the angrier Nik is getting. Finally, it looks like it clicks. “I was there, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to. It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re damn right it doesn’t,” Nik snaps.

Without turning, she jabs a finger back in his direction. “Nik, with all due respect, shut the fuck up.”

Pindrop silence descends save for the echoes of bird cries, the buzz of insects, and motion farther in the settlement—as well as quiet murmuring from bystanders that are thankfully distant enough they _hopefully_ can’t hear what’s going on.

But they’re creeping forward, and as the tense pause stretches on, her inquisitive stare unbreaking from Roland, Quinn realizes she needs to do something to keep this from blowing further out of proportion.

“All of you go the fuck back to what you were doing before. _Back. Off_.” The venom in her voice successfully spooks all the would-be snoopers into backing away and leaving, and she holds for a moment before continuing. “Why’d you stick around if you didn’t want to?”

Discomfort joins the guilt in his expression. “I was scared.”

“Of?”

“What the fuck do you want from me?” Roland bites out, face twisting in a grimace and hand lifting to tangle through his hair in agitation. Her hard stare remains, though, and it forces an answer out of him. “Of the bastard I was following! I was fucking terrified of him, okay? He didn’t deal with _defectors_ pleasantly, and I was fucking terrified. Are you fucking happy, now?”

Her expression softens, the answer explaining a good deal about how he acts in just a handful of words. The shift makes him even less comfortable and more agitated, and that tells her even _more_.

Blinking, she turns to glance at Nik and Nyx, both of whom seem a bit calmer, though all-encompassing loathing still colors the harsh lines of Nik’s face. “I wasn’t there, so it’s not up to me if that makes a difference. For what it’s worth, Nik, I wouldn’t have made it here without him.”

Leilani steps around Nyx, eyeing Roland as she moves closer to Nik. “I remember him. He tried to tell those other guardians to not be so rough and to let go of me. They threatened him because of it.”

“That doesn’t change—”

“No, it doesn’t!” Leilani cuts Nik off, and Roland stiffens. “But give him a chance. Maybe he wants to make up for it.”

At this Roland lets out a humorless bark of laughter, and his tone is laced with bitterness when he speaks. “No, I fucking don’t. I was following that monster for a few hundred years, you think there’s anything I can do to make up for _that_ amount of complicit bloodshed?”

No one says anything.

He turns a hard stare on Nikon, eyes betraying the weary guilt he must have been carrying around for far too long. “Kill me if you fucking want. Maybe it’ll make one of us feel better,” he says, and then storms off.

She supposes it’s a good sign that Nik doesn’t immediately take the open opportunity to tear his head from his shoulders.

“You really think he’s someone you can trust?” Nik demands, pulling her eyes back to them.

“I think he’s an asshole,” she replies, earning a snort from Nyx, “but I was with him during the invasion and over the weeks it took us to make it here. Asshole or not, I don’t think he’s who you think he is.”

Leilani and Nyx both seem to accept it—reluctantly, in Nyx’s case—and Leilani rushes in for another hug that Nyx is quick to offer as well. Nikon stands back, silent and looking deep in thought.

“I don’t trust him,” he says, at length, after Leilani and Nyx have wandered off.

She nods. “I know. Can you trust me, instead?”

He doesn’t respond.

Glyph chooses then to flash into sight, glancing in the direction Roland had left. Its shell twitches as it blinks at their team leader. “She’s right about what she said before, Nik. We ran out of food and she started getting really weak. If he hadn’t been there to help push her forward, we wouldn’t have made it here.”

“You would have,” she points out, wincing at the unpleasant thought, “I wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t leave you. Not ever,” it gives her a disapproving blip, and her throat tightens with emotion.

A heavy sigh leaves Nik, and they both watch as he lifts a hand to rub his forehead. Then, he steps forward with a weary smile, his arms open for a hug of his own. “I’m glad you made it.”

“You too,” she replies, not caring how awkward it is trying to hug a fully-armored titan that’s twice her weight and over a head taller than her.

“That bastard_ at least_ gets a few points for helping the baby of the team make it here alive.”

An undignified noise leaves her, and he starts laughing. “When are you going to stop calling me that?”

“As soon as you stop being so short and as good as ‘Lani at wrapping the rest of us around your fingers,” he quips, ruffling her hair despite her protests and attempts to slap his hand away.

They follow after Leilani and Nyx after that, finding a quieter area of the settlement to talk and get caught up. Darin had made it safely out of the City as well, to her relief, and all four of them managed to make it to the edge of the City before the light had been cut off.

Nikon looks haunted as he talks about it, and she doesn’t blame him for rushing through that particular bit of their story. It must have thrown him back to what had happened before his arrival in the City, and he hadn’t needed to share the gory details for any of them to understand how horrible the slaughter of Carran had been.

They’d gotten lucky, with few Cabal patrols in the area they’d fled to, and they’d been all but invisible as they slipped through holes in the wall to escape.

An ambush by the Cabal _after_ leaving the City had made things harrowing—and Quinn is left speechless when she’s told that a band of _Fallen_ had been the ones to intervene and get them out of what could have easily been a nasty situation.

Leilani mentions there’s a story there that she’ll tell her about later, and Nik looks like he sucked on a lemon as she says it.

Her and Glyph trade off on recounting how she and Roland had made it out of the City. Nikon seems to lose a bit of his hard stance on him when Glyph gets to the part about Roland actually _carrying_ her to Hawthorne’s band of scouts, but looks no less irritated that he’s voluntarily restraining himself from strangling him.

She isn’t too pleased when the subject turns to her and the retention of her light—especially not when Nik, Nyx, and all three of their ghosts alike start tossing around theories on _why_ she’s unaffected by the Traveler’s capture.

Nyx suggests, at one point, that she may not have a connection to the Traveler at all. None of them like it, and she has to lift her hands in surrender, adding an, “it’s just a thought,” before dropping it.

Roland remains distant throughout the next day after the incident with her team. It occurs to her that he may have simply bit the bullet and _left_, and she’s surprised to find that the idea upsets her, even if just a little.

Refugees still trickle in over the passing hours, but by now, weeks after the Cabal invasion, it seems like the influx of newcomers has all but halted.

Makeshift housing stretches far past the initial boundaries of the Farm, little more than a camp of lean-tos and tents that are shared by too many people and traded off on use, but it’s all the settlement can manage in the face of such a huge amount of new faces.

‘Huge’ being a mild estimation. Mostly civilians, though a fair number of guardians made it. Still, guardians had numbered in the thousands before the invasion—and if she has to guess, she’d say there are only a larger percentage of a single thousand here, now.

More may have survived and are in the surrounding areas, or may have managed to flee off-world, but it’s discomforting to think of just how many lights had been extinguished that night.

She tries not to think about it too much. There’s only one member of her fireteam missing, but he’s not the only one she’s afraid she may have lost.

It’s a little over twenty-four hours after reuniting with her fireteam that her idle, wandering thoughts are interrupted; a sharp falcon’s cry pierces the air and she jerks when a light buffet of wings on the back of her head announces Louis’s return, nearly dropping the crate of supplies in her hands.

She blinks, her eyes landing on the falcon as he perches on a fencepost nearby, staring at her. He trills once, then takes off again.

If Louis is back, then—

Glyph blips excitedly. “Hawthorne must be back!”

She apologizes to the settlers she’s helping and sets the supplies she’s carrying down, then takes off after Louis. Nyx asks her what the hurry is as she nearly bowls over her and Nik in her rush, and she pays the question no mind, her thoughts singularly focused on why Hawthorne had left and what her being back might mean.

Skidding to a halt in front of what Quinn is counting as the ‘head’ barn in the settlement, she looks around frantically for Hawthorne’s familiar pink-and-blue poncho.

When she spots her, her eyes also settle on a figure in dark blue robes, tall and with a messy mop of short black hair atop his head, one of his eyebrows sporting a distinctive scar through it. Relief floods through her at the sight. “_Luke!_”

Hawthorne lets out a surprised noise, having to rapidly hop out of the way as she barrels right into Luke and throws her arms around his neck. His own wrap around her and crush her to his chest.

“Holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshit Quinn you’re okay _holy shit_, Hawthorne said you asked her to come find us and I wasn’t sure if I should believe it I was so worried _I’m so glad to see you_,” he babbles in rapidfire.

She struggles to breathe with the force of his hug and she truly couldn’t care less. Breathless laughter leaves her when he lifts her from her feet and wiggles her back and forth.

He sets her back down, but before she can back up, he pulls her into his chest again with his arms around her shoulders and his cheek resting on top of her head, melodramatic cries leaving him that have her grinning.

“Luke!” Leilani yells, and Quinn realizes the others had caught up.

The cries cease immediately and he lets go of her quickly enough that she stumbles and has to steady herself. She watches as he drops the _mostly_ overdramatic tears drop like a mask and turns to face a rapidly approaching Leilani with his arms open wide, a massive, beaming grin on his face. “_Partner in crime_!”

Leilani gets the same smothering kind of greeting she had, and she turns to Hawthorne while the rest of her fireteam and all their ghosts catch up. Her bright grin dims, pure gratitude replacing it. “Thank you.”

“Hey, don’t thank me. Thank your hunter pal with the creepy-good instincts. He found us before we found them,” she replies.

Her smile drops from befuddlement, Hawthorne’s words combining with the ‘_us_’ Luke had used that she had barely registered—clearly, she isn’t referring to Roland. But then, who—?

Head turning to follow the gesture Hawthorne makes over her shoulder, Quinn’s eyes widen at the figure they settle on.

She thinks, at first, that the stress of the past few weeks has gotten to her. Her disbelieving gaze pours over the familiar dark armor and tattered black cloak, the impassive, blank visor of his helmet darkened further by the hood pulled over it. The reserved posture, the silence that would unnerve almost anyone else—the practiced stillness that makes him all but invisible in most situations.

It can’t be anyone else.

A strangled noise of raw emotion bubbles in her throat.

It’s been two fucking years since she had last seen Kel.

His arms are already open for her by the time she darts forward and throws herself into them, and she holds him just as tightly as Luke had held her. He reciprocates in full, and it’s her first indication that something has changed him since they’d last seen each other.

No matter how close they’ve been over the years, he’s _never _liked being touched.

“I missed you,” she says, sniffing and hoping he doesn’t mind the tears now falling and wetting the material of his cloak.

“I know. I’m sorry.” His arms squeeze her just a bit tighter, fingers digging into her back like he’s worried _she_ might be the one to disappear this time. That alone says enough that she doesn’t have to hear the _me too_ aloud.

Something has _definitely_ changed about him. For the better.

He lets go of her only when she pulls away, and she wonders if she’s imagining the smile she can sense more than see behind the helmet. He still won’t take it off; some things change, some things stay the same.

Echo flashes into sight to greet her as well, letting out a strained trill of happiness and blinking behind the crack splitting the glass of her eye. She bumps into Quinn’s cheek once, chirps again, and then flits off towards the rest of the group in order to pointedly bump into Glyph as well.

Glyph lets out what can only be described as a startled shriek, and she bursts into laughter.

Once her laughter has died down, she wipes away the tears that had fallen, smiling and reaching out to touch Kel’s arm. With a nod, she urges him forward. “C’mon, you should meet the rest of the team.”

The introduction of Nikon worries her; Kel’s reserved and generally non-confrontational, but she has no idea how he’ll react to someone else replacing Gil. Thankfully he doesn’t seem to mind, his voice remaining even and warm.

Nik, on the other hand, is wary—but that changes quickly when Kel’s distant demeanor drops entirely for something openly kind as Leilani introduces herself.

He still has the soft spot for kids. She smiles.

Kel’s easy entrance into—or _back_ into—the team lifts her spirits enough to distract her from her last missing link for a while, but it creeps back in as more time passes. Save for _him_, the only other link is her newfound ally (whether he likes it or not), and she’s determined to bring him into the fold.

She finds the start of that process a few days after Luke and Kel’s arrival at the Farm, when they’re all discussing what to do now that none of them, save for herself, have the light to fight back with.

“There’s not much we _can_ do,” Nyx huffs, legs crossed where she sits next to Quinn on the edge of a tall crate, one heel kicking the surface of the box. “The Vanguard are God-knows-where, if they’re even still alive—sorry, Quinn—and an assault to take the City back world...not end well.”

Luke is fidgeting anxiously, looking like he’s trying to decide if he should speak up. She isn’t the only one that notices.

Kel stretches out a leg to lightly kick the back of Luke’s boot. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to.

“I, uh—I may have a solution? Possibly. I’m not sure,” Luke finally manages to get out.

Nikon lifts an expectant eyebrow. Luke opens his mouth.

“Wait, wait wait wait—” Quinn blurts out, holding her hands up and hopping down from her perch next to Nyx. “Hold that thought. I’ll be right back.”

Without waiting for their response, she turns and breaks into a hard jog away from their gathering spot a bit farther away from the main hustle and bustle with Glyph in tow.

She’s lucky. The first spot she checks—which happens to be the same shadowed corner under the edge of a roof she had found him in the other day—is where she finds Roland. Her purposeful steps get his attention, and he gives her a look of blatantly forced disdain that she ignores.

“C’mon, asshole, team huddle,” she says.

He stares at her and doesn’t move.

Her eyes narrow. “I can and _will_ warp your happy ass all the way across the Farm if I have to, and then _you_ get to explain why I’ve still got my light when everyone starts demanding answers.”

“I don’t fucking _know_ why you still have your light,” he snaps, though it lacks a good deal of the bite he’s obviously trying for. When her eyebrows lift pointedly, he swears under his breath and nods, bristling with aggravation as he follows her back to where the team is.

Nikon visibly tenses when Roland comes into sight, which is exactly why—instead of returning to her previous spot next to him and Nyx—she steers him to the opposite side of the gathered group and drops to the ground next to Kel.

Roland stares warily at Nikon, then opts to back away until he’s leaning against a nearby tree.

“Okay,” she says, brightly, pretending the tense atmosphere stretching between Nik and Roland is nonexistent, “Luke, continue.”

The warlock glances back and forth between their leader and the newcomer he and Kel haven’t yet been introduced to. “Uh...so...I’ve been having these really weird dreams, right?”

“Oh, this is starting off great,” Roland mutters—then grunts when Quinn grabs a small rock and chucks it at his leg.

“I mean, I say dreams, but they’re more like visions, and I _know_ that makes me sound nuts—” Roland gets another rock to the leg when he interrupts Luke with a _no shit_, “—but I really, _really_ think it means something because I kept having the _same_ one every time we slept on the way here.”

“It’s worth pursuing,” Kel says, breaking the silence that Luke’s words result in.

Luke gestures at Kel with lifted eyebrows at everyone else.

“Visions,” Nik repeats, dubiously. When Luke nods emphatically, he drops his head to scratch the back of his neck. “Of what?”

“That.”

All heads turn to follow when Luke points into the distance, past the fields that give this settlement its name and farther still, deep within the forest beyond—where the massive, miles-high, rounded chunk of that broken half-dome she’s noticed before sits. The unnatural fog that hovers around it and the forest it lies within flickers with light as electricity crackles through it, flashing through the dimming twilight of the night descending around it.

“You’re joking, right?” Nyx asks, though not unkindly. Just curiously.

Quinn blinks at the object; she’s seen it during her time here, of course, but she’s not understanding the significance.

Glyph bumps into her shoulder to get her attention. “That’s a shard of the Traveler. It was blasted off during the Collapse.”

_ Oh _.

“That’s what I think my visions were pointing me to,” Luke says after a beat, his tone now filled with the kind of determination usually reserved for whenever he’s gone beyond scatterbrained speculation and is absolutely certain he knows what he’s talking about.

All eyes return to him.

“I think we can get our light back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and fin.  
i have no plans to do what i'm doing with _The Line_ and trudge through the entire campaign (with liberties taken), but i likely will be doing a drabble series at some point that'll feature some scattered scenes across the broader destiny universe starring this absolute hot mess of a fireteam.
> 
> thanks for reading!


End file.
